


The Swan Prince

by distractionpie



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Arranged Marriage, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Royalty, Animal Transformation, Curses, Dragonslaying, I realised like a year late that I forgot to give this any tags, M/M, Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-18 06:09:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 26,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20634380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/distractionpie/pseuds/distractionpie
Summary: Once upon a time there was a Queen named Amanda with a mighty kingdom; and yet, she was sad, because she was growing older and had no child to inherit the throne. Then, happily, a prince was born, and he was given the name Nines.Kings and Queens came from all around to welcome him. Among them was the Regent of their neighbouring kingdom, Prince Elijah, and his young half-brother, Crown Prince Gavin. It was then that Amanda and Elijah happened upon the same idea: Nines and Gavin would be betrothed at once, so that they would one day marry and join the kingdoms forever.But unknown to all was another plan, that of the enchanter, Perkins. Nines’ birth was of little concern to him for he was planning to take the kingdom for himself.But on the eve of the assault, Amanda’s armies attacked and Perkins’ plans were destroyed.However, despite calls for his death, the enchanter was only banished. Before his departure, Perkins swore that one day he would have his vengeance and many feared that Queen Amanda was too confident in her defeat of him.But in time the threat was forgotten, and the kingdom’s thoughts turned to bright plans for that steadily approaching summer when Nines and Gavin would marry…





	1. Chapter 1

** _Twenty-four years later_ ** ** _…_ **

** **

Growing up, every summer was the same brand of torture. Uncomfortable clothing, formal meetings, and every adult in the vicinity trying to shove Gavin towards his fiance and scolding him when he grew irritable with the constant pressure to pretend to be pleased despite the the fact that both kingdoms knew that he and Nines had never gotten along.

But for the last three years, summers have been almost tolerable. The first year because Gavin’s own kingdom had been swept by a sickness and, while it had eventually turned out far less dangerous than the initial symptoms had suggested, a quarantine had been in place that had meant even though Gavin was well Elijah would be deemed a hypocrite for allowing him to travel when all traders were being stopped at the border.

And the next summer, Queen Amanda had embarked on a royal tour of her allies and had decided that having her son accompany her was of a higher priority than sending him to endure awkward meetings with his fiance. That had been unexpected and at the time had Gavin wondering if perhaps the Queen was seeking a different husband for her son, reneging on the agreement made in their infancy due to her blatant disapproval of the person Gavin had grown into.

Tina had laughed at that. “When they've already got a deal worked out with their nearest neighbours to join and form the largest nation on the continent? Face it Gav, they've been gradually merging the kingdoms for years, and they just need you two to tie the knot and make it official. This trip is about teaching him the international politics to actually run the country, after all, one of you ought to know how and, let's be honest, it's not gonna be you.”

The previous year had once again been Gavin’s turn to travel to Amanda’s kingdom but he’d wormed out of it by citing his military commitments, leaned hard on Elijah’s unwillingness for them to be seen taking excess advantage of their positions - Gavin had signed on to work with the kingdoms armies and it would not improve the public opinions of royals if he was given the summer off while the regular soldiers toiled. Elijah forced an end to Gavin’s involvement with the military in anything other than a ceremonial capacity soon after though, a petty act of control that Gavin full intends to do away with once he turns twenty five and becomes king.

But now Queen Amanda and her son are visiting again and rumour has it this year will be it. Nobody has said anything to Gavin, of course, but for some reason they don't seem to have caught on yet that anything juicy Tina heard came racing back to his ears. He’d had his own suspicions regardless, by the next summer he’ll have come of age and taken the throne, it only made sense that Elijah would want the union completed before that point.

There would be no more grand tours or convenient disasters, by the end of this summer Nines and Gavin will be married and his whole chest tightens at the thought.

He’s supposed to be in the entrance hall now, waiting to greet his future husband and the rest of the visiting party, but he’s feigned a headache and apparently Elijah has decided that calling him on the lie and having him dragged to meet his fiance would be more embarrassing than his absence.

There’s no avoiding it forever, Gavin just wants a few more hours.

Tina has joined him in his room and is watching from the window for the arrival of the royal carriages while Gavin lazes on his bed, knowing this will likely be his last chance at peace.

He’s most ignoring Tina’s commentary on the new arrivals, dozens of dignitaries all of whom only heighten Gavin’s suspicion that a date is about to be set, until she almost topples out of the window seat with a shriek of, “Oh my god, what have they been feeding him?”

It has to be Nines. Nobody else in Queen Amanda’s party would be interesting enough to Tina to provoke such a forceful reaction.

“Oh god, he's not gotten fat has he?” he blurts out. It had been years since they’d seen each other, who knows how wrong the picture he has in his head of Nines has become. It’s not like the engagement is gonna be called off if Nines has let himself go, but Gavin has been calling Nines beanpole ever since that awful summer when they were thirteen and Nines had arrived two inches taller than he was and Gavin just can’t imagine him anything other than lanky.

Tina laughs. “Oh Gavin, this you have to see for yourself.”

Gavin stands, determination to put off Nines’ invasion of his life forgotten in the face of his curiosity, but by the time he’s crossed the room to the window the royals have already entered and all he catches sight of are the the various attendants trailing behind them.

Fuck.

“Tina,” he starts to implore, but she just shakes her head.

“Wait and see,” she says. “He’ll be at the ball in a few hours, surely you have the patience to wait until then?”

He doesn’t and Tina knows it, she’s just being cruel, but Gavin knows that there’ll be no persuading her otherwise. When they were thirteen Gavin had started combat training and Tina had been told that she couldn’t join him because combat training wasn’t for girls. In response Gavin had flatly refused to participate without Tina and since the crown Prince had to have combat training they had to accept Tina too, and he’s glad to have had her by his side this whole time but it does mean that somewhere along the way she’s picked up his habit of winning arguments by being the stubbornest.

The evening can’t come fast enough then, Gavin wants to know now what changes three years have wrought but he also knows that Nines and Queen Amanda will be preparing for the ball so there’s nothing he can do except endure far too much time getting into formal-wear, pinning all the the sashes and detailing into place, and groomed to a standard that won’t have Elijah setting man-servants on him as if everyone in Queen Amanda’s delegation hadn’t seen him covered in mud and picking pine needles out of his mouth after a childhood attempt to prank Nines had gone horribly wrong.

The routine of arrival is familiar, courtiers already lined up around the room when Gavin is presented, but as guests of honour Nines and Queen Amanda will be some of the last to arrive so that the rest of the guests can see their presentation. Gavin sticks to the fringes of the party, knowing too well that whispers will follow him wherever he goes but in no temper to encourage them. The ballroom is frustratingly packed, a testament to his peoples belief that a wedding date will be set soon, but that makes it hard to find Tina, his usual solace at boring events like this.

He lurks beside the musicians instead, their playing loud enough that nobody within a few feet can carry out a conversation which therefore increases the likelihood of Gavin remaining unmolested by smirking lords who think provoking him would give them leverage to get favours from Elijah in recompense or simpering ones who think sucking up to him now will advantage them when he becomes king.

The music is so loud, in fact, that he misses the pronouncement of Queen Amanda’s entry, only turning when he notices that the talk of the crowd has dipped in volume, and catching the tail end of Nines’ presentation.

And oh fuck, Tina should have warned him better.

Nines has definitely filled out — in all the right places. In the place of the gangling boy Gavin had waved off at the docks three Septembers ago is a perfect specimen of a man: not a trace of puppy fat clinging to features anymore; an elegant coiffure; and a suit tailored masterfully, jacket in Queen Amanda’s royal blue that highlights his broad shoulders and cream breeches clinging to shapely calves and solid thighs, and Gavin knows he's staring, is pretty sure he's gaping actually, but he can’t tear himself away and one look at the cut of Nines trousers makes clear that if he turns around then Gavin might die on the spot.

He tugs at his own jacket, certain that as soon as he greets Nines every person in the ballroom is going to draw a comparison between the two and find him wanting, but he also knows his obligations and how much more embarrassing it will be if people see him fail to meet them, so he straightens his spine and weaves his way across the ballroom to join his fiance.

“Prince Nines,” he addresses his fiance, dipping into a formal bow. They’d fallen into a familiar sort of pattern in their youth, Nines embodying everything his mother wanted and Gavin grudgingly doing the bare minimum of what Elijah demanded, but three years has been long enough that the habits don’t come instinctively and while Gavin has little doubt that Nines never stops thinking of how to be Amanda’s perfect heir, Elijah isn’t here to prod him into remembering his niceties.

“Your highness,” Nines returns the greeting, and that, at least, is familiar, the oddly intense way he has of saying Gavin’s formal address. He’s the only person from whom Gavin has never heard it said like a joke, first because of his youth and later just because of his character.

Neither of them bother making a pretence at ‘good to see you’ or ‘are you enjoying the evening’, Queen Amanda and Elijah might like the illusion that the princes can be civil to one another but they aren’t close enough to here so as long as they look like the picture of propriety it doesn’t matter how cold things actually are between them.

They both know what comes next though. This is a ball, after all.

Up close Nines’ blue eyes are piercing, less the watery blue of somebody who spent too much time squinting at library books and more knowing in a way that makes Gavin want to squirm as Nines says, almost certainly by rote, “May I have this dance, Your Highness.”

Gavin can hardly say no, even if right now every instinct he has is telling him to get the hell away from Nines until he can get his head on straight, because Nines has offered offered with a wave of his arm in the direction of the dance floor and there is no chance that they aren’t being watched. As a child he may have pushed his boundaries, but Elijah has made it perfectly clear, the fate of both their countries lies in this marriage and the consequences of Gavin publicly rejecting or insulting his fiance could be disastrous.

So he takes Nines’ proffered arm, although his grip is so lose as to be almost pointless and, as the next song starts, a simple waltz thank fuck, lets himself be led onto the floor.

The first few steps are fumbled as they find their place but for the first time since they'd been forced together at a ball they aren't fighting over who leads, Gavin still too floored to put up a fight. He’s not even sure he wants to when he’d being held close to that broad chest and beneath the hand that rests on Nines’ arm he can feel the firm muscle below his jacket. The dance is still awkward, far below the level of elegance he knows is expected of people in their position, but it’s a different sort of awkwardness, one that stems not from reluctance or because he's not used to doing the steps backward, but the exploratory stumbles of two people experiencing something for the first time, despite the fact they’ve been thrust together at every ball of the summer since they were old enough to attend.

It would be smarter to dance in silence, avoid any unnecessary chances for Nines to irk him or for Gavin to say something his dance partner could scorn, but it has been three years and they’re going to be married.

“I think they’re going to announce a date tonight,” he admits Nines, jerking his head in the direction of the current rulers where they sit at the high table. He wishes that he would at least be warned for certain but he’s fairly sure Elijah thinks springing it on him will reduce the chance of Gavin attempting to stall. Nines deserves to know it’s coming though, they might as well start off the marriage with a little co-operation.

Nines shakes his head though, murmuring, “There are visitors yet to arrive, and they will not want to overshadow our arrival or make things look rushed—” rushed, as if this wasn’t all arranged without them more than two decades ago, “—it will be soon though. Probably after the dance at the end of the hunt this weekend.”

The end of the week. Another six days for Gavin to wait knotted up with anticipate of the announcing of the date that will tell him how many weeks of pseudo-freedom remain to him before he and Nines are inextricably bound.

“You know, perhaps this marriage won’t be so bad,” he blurts out.

It’s a stupid thing to say, it’s definitely going to be awful still, Gavin doesn’t want to be married to somebody who responds to everything he does with the disdainful frown Nines is shooting him right now, it’s just that for a few brief moments when they were both focused on dancing Gavin had forgotten they didn’t like each other and it hadn’t been terrible.

“What do you mean, Your Highness?”

What does Gavin mean? He doesn’t even know, he just wants to find a way for this not to be awful for them both and his mouth is running away with him because he’s apparently had all the sense knocked out of his head by his future husband’s good looks, which is probably why what tumbles out of his mouth is, “Well, you’re gorgeous?”

There’s a long pause, then Nines says, “What else?”

Gavin stares. What the fuck? Is Nines expecting Gavin to talk about all the policy reasons their guardians arranged their match? It is what it is, Gavin’s just trying to find a fucking bright-side. Nines doesn’t like him and he’s never been able to get along with Nines but at least they’ll be able to look at each other down the table presuming Nines doesn’t want to deal with their marriage by avoiding Gavin at all costs. Unless Nines is pissed that the bright-side is pretty much exclusively for Gavin, but honestly nothing Gavin says or does has ever made Nines do anything but disapprove of him so why even bother trying?

“What else is there?” he says eventually, because their marriage has always been an inevitability but at least they’re peers —albeit ones with no common interests— rather than either of them being married off to the elderly rulers of far more foreign lands — one of Elijah’s favourite threats for when he was trying to convince Gavin that he ought to stop railing against the arrangement.

Nines’ frown deepens. “Do you mean that?”

Gavin doesn’t answer for a moment, too focused on stumbling through a particularly complicated turn —and how is it that he can have such impeccable co-ordination in the ring or with a sword in his hand but on a dance floor in Nines’ arm his legs seem to detach entirely from his brain?— but then the words register and he says, “Well, yeah. What else matters?” Nines knows as well as he does that there’s no getting out of this.

He’s always thought Nines looked at him coldly, but the way his eyes harden as he looks at Gavin now is new and a little startling.

“Is that so?”

Gavin feels himself bristling in response. “What did you want, a pretty lie? You won’t disobey your mother and Elijah would probably have me killed if I fucked up his schemes now,” Gavin hasn’t actually worked out what it is Elijah gains out of the merging kingdoms, because despite his claims it’s not at all like Elijah to be doing it for the good of the common people, but he knows his half-brother would go to lengths to see it through.

“For a moment I hoped that you'd finally grown out of being that stupid, self-absorbed little boy I spent my summers with,” Nines says, voice low enough not to be overheard but tone frosty. “Apparently not.”

And then Nines steps back.

And mid-song, in the middle of the ballroom, he walks away.

The shock has Gavin frozen for a moment, furiously aware of all the people staring at them and reeling at the fact that after all their years of fights he’s finally found the think that will break through Nines’ perfect prince facade and he’s not even sure why it bothers him so much. Gavin was only stating the obvious.

People are whispering as he retreats from the dance-floor — well of course they are, the crown prince’s fiance has just abandoned him mid-dance. There’s no way to play this off as anything other than as bad as it looks, across the room he can see Elijah’s disapproving frown and Amanda’s cold stare, and he knows there be consequences and he knows that, just like in every childhood scuffle and squabble, it will be him who takes the blame. Nines may have been the one to storm out but he’s also Queen Amanda's perfect heir, who can do no wrong and should things ever appear otherwise it must be because Gavin forced or framed him.

He could find another partner and keep dancing. Nobody is going to ask him but he's the Prince and if he offers nobody will refuse. That would show them. Why should he indulge Nines’ pointless dramatics? But the prospect is boring and Gavin knows even if he makes a show of not caring it won't be satisfying. How he feels has never mattered.

Fuck it, if Nines gets to leave then Gavin isn’t sticking around a moment longer. Technically, he’s the one who’s done better here, he arrived first and has stayed the longest. Nobody will see it that way, but he can wallow in his own resentful knowledge that their scorn is unearned. For all the good that habit ever does him.

He knows people are watching as he leaves, both princes departing early is quite the scandal, and not even the juice sneaking-off-together sort of scandal, but the only onlooker Gavin cares to give any attention to is Tina, gratified when she breaks away from the group she’s with to follow him out.

Not gratified enough to wait for her, but it’s not like she’d need help to follow him.

Outside of the ballroom, the castle is quieter than usual, all of the servants focused around the festivities, and that means he can cut through back passages that are typically only used by maids and footmen trying to move discretely without worrying that one of them is going to complain to the butler of being unnerved by his presence and incite a lecture from Elijah about remembering his station. No-one had ever minded when he was small, but at some point in his adolescence the knowledge that he’d one day be king had suddenly come crashing down and when he wandered into the kitchens the cooks curtsied instead of sneaking him cream-cakes. Gavin wished he could have kept the latter.

He crashes into his chambers, throwing his jacket down on the chair and catching sight of himself in the mirror as he storms over to his bed. When he’d left he’d thought he looked okay but now he can see that he’s missed spots when he was shaving, hadn’t thought it had matter because it’s not like Nines could call of an arrangement that’s been over two decades in the making just because of a little stubble, he’d thought the candle-light made the dark circles under his eyes less noticeable but perhaps they were still too much, and then there’s the scar.

All in all he doesn’t look much like a prince at all, even before Nines had made him look such a fuckin’ fool.

“Well, that was a disaster,” he groans, knowing that Tina is following him into the room.

Tina laughs and shoves his jacket aside, hitching her skirts to settle cross-legged on the chair.

“Stop staring at the mirror, he didn’t walk out just because he’d suddenly decided he couldn’t stand your face and you know it,” Tina says, rolling her eyes. “Now tell me what really happened.”

So Gavin does, reciting all of the usual rigmarole that they go through at these events and then the moment where he’d completely lost his head and tried to convince himself that they could make something bearable of the marriage—

“So you realised he’d got hot and suddenly decided that even though you’ve never liked each other this marriage wouldn’t be such a terrible idea after all?” Tina says dubiously.

“Yes,” he snaps. Temporarily dazzled by a pretty face despite years of fighting. Some King he’s going to make. “And y’know, if I find out the reason my future husband doesn't want me is because you made me ugly I'm banishing you.”

“You practically headbutted my sword,” Tina dismisses. “And has anyone ever told you that you're very shallow Gav?”

He rolls his eyes. What kind of question is that? “When would anybody have ever told me anything without you being there?” If somebody had ever said that he’d have told Tina immediately. That was just what they did.

“Well, I don’t know. You been betrothed to him pretty much your whole life and been complaining about it for nearly as long and now you find out he’s gotten hot you’re like, ‘oh, maybe being married to him won’t be so bad’, I feel like somebody should be questioning that.”

Gavin glances around briefly for something to throw at her, but comes up tragically short. “Yeah, well I guess the hotness tricked me into thinking he might have become tolerable, but he’s just as uptight and stuffy as ever. You can practically see Queen Amanda pulling his little puppet strings.” Gavin might be going along with Elijah’s plan but at least he’s been honest while doing it, while everything Nines does is so blatantly out of some hundred year old book on royal behaviour.

“God, I’m glad I don’t have to watch you face down Elijah at breakfast tomorrow,” Tina remarks. She doesn’t need to tell him how angry his brother will be, nor that he’d only made it worse by leaving early even though what else was he supposed to do when everybody knew the whole party was about forcing him and Nines together and Nines had walked away.

“I’m not scared of Elijah,” Gavin grumbles. It’s not like his brother can actually do anything to him — in a way Elijah screwed himself over because marrying Nines is such a daunting prospect that Elijah has nothing worse he can threaten as an alternative if Gavin doesn’t comply.

“Yes, well, when you get disinherited because you ruined an alliance decades in the making you can make a living by writing a book ‘How to offend your fiance in five syllables or less’.”

“Elijah can’t disinherit me,” Gavin points out. He’s fairly sure that if he could have done so his half-brother would have done years ago, he’s certainly made no secret of the fact he thinks Gavin is unfit for the job. “And it’s not ruined. Nines has gone off in sulks before, he always goes back to being boring soon enough though.”

“Private sulks, yeah,” Tina says, “But walking out on your in front of both courts? Maybe those years away have ruined his tolerance for your bullshit.”

Gavin rolls his eyes and purposefully thinks of anything other than Nines as he’s lying in bed, annoyingly still awake hours after Tina had retreated to her own chambers.

But the next day, Nines does not join them at the royal breakfast.

Gavin spends the whole meal refusing to quail under Elijah’s disappointed glare and Queen Amanda’s disapproving frown.

What had they expected, arranging a marriage between children too have even developed a personality when the deal was struck and sticking to their agreement even after it had became clear that Nines and Gavin couldn’t be more ill-matched?

Fortunately Elijah has enough planned that day that there's no time for him to pull Gavin aside for yet another lecture on the importance of the joining of the kingdoms. Less fortunately all of these festivities were intended to welcome Queen Amanda and her son, so Nines’ absence is conspicuous. Everyone seems to be looking between his empty seat and Gavin, judgement heavy in their gazes, but worse is the fact that Gavin has never realised before just how much he depended on trying to irritate a reaction out of Nines to get through the tedium of all the speeches about the beauty of unity —all the more absurd when one of the key parties is so disinterested in this union that he’s absent— and the technical details of finalising the joining of two nations.

Gavin skips lunch, if Nines is playing hooky then he should definitely be able to and sitting with Elijah and Queen Amanda kills his appetite, but he returns for the afternoon session, hoping that Nines had just slept in and Gavin will be able to lord the error over him — remind him that he's not so perfect after all.

But when he doesn’t turn up, Gavin starts to grind his teeth. What is Nines playing at? The snub is something that Gavin might pull but nothing that happened last night merits this sort of behaviour from the ever proper Prince Nines. Queen Amanda is clearly furious.

During a break in the schedule he seeks out Tina, needing to vent his annoyance before it comes spilling out in public and he disturbs the rest of Queen Amanda's delegation into joining his fiance in hiding.

“What the fuck is he even doing, hiding in his room? If he’s thinking about breaking things off—” Gavin doesn't actually think Nines would go that far, or ever close to it really, but to Tina he can acknowledge being unsettled by this sudden rejection. Nines has never shirked a formal event before let alone walked out on a ball and skipped two meals.

“He put up with an entire childhood of you refusing to include him in things and then sulking and pestering if he found anything to do that wasn’t trailing after us,” Tina says. “If he didn't run screaming for the hills years ago, I’m sure he won’t hold a grudge over you saying one slightly stupid thing.”

“You make me sound like a hypocrite,” Gavin complains. “I can not want him around without wanting him sucking up to courtiers, this is supposed to be my country.”

Tina shoots him a scornful look and Gavin knows how immature he must sound but even as a child Nines had been ‘such a sweet, smart boy’ while Gavin had been ‘I’m sure he’ll grow out of that rambunctious behaviour’ and as they’d gotten older it had only become worse, Nines growing regal and scholarly while Gavin’s edges had seemed to only get rougher as trained with the guards and then the soldiers — when they marry it will be so that their kingdoms join and they’ll be equal rulers but Gavin has no illusions that most people think Nines will make the better ruler, the least he could do was not make it worse by sucking up to Gavin’s people.

“The point is, you’ve said stupid things to him before, you said so yourself last night, so why the worry now?”

Better question. Why was Nines reacting like this now? He and Gavin had been at loggerheads almost from the start, at the young age they’d been introduced how could the prospect of future marriage have inspired anything other than disgust and wariness, and things had never gotten better but Nines had never let his decorum slip in public. Oh, there’s been a fair number of cold words when they weren’t being too closely chaperoned and more than one vicious prank Gavin is certain that Nines was responsible for even if it couldn’t be proved, but Nines cared about pleasing his mother and upholding royal standards and the lapse is disconcerting.

And annoying.

Especially when Nines isn’t at dinner either.

A place is set for him though and the expectant look on Queen Amanda’s face makes Gavin suspect that she has employed some of Elijah’s tactics and sent someone to bully, threaten, or bribe Nines, bringing her son to the dinner by any means necessary.

So they’re waiting, and Gavin is familiar enough with the way meals are run to be certain that agitated servants are waiting just out of sight, ready to serve the first course and growing increasingly worried it will cool or that the delay will mess up the timing of all the other dishes, but whom must have been ordered to wait until the meal is fully attended.

When the door opens, however, it’s neither Nines coming to join them or a footman ready to serve. Instead it’s a servant dressed in the livery of Queen Amanda’s people, and Gavin is familiar enough with the uniform to recognise that this is one of the more senior members of her staff, but he still looks horribly nervous as he approaches the table, dropping into a bow that’s low but far too sloppy for a professional.

“Is my son not coming to dinner?” Queen Amanda asks, icy cold tone clearly daring the servant to say that he has failed his mission. God, being married to Nines is going to be hell if he’s as much like his mother as he seems.

“I… your majesty, I’m so sorry,” the servant says. “But Prince Nines has disappeared.”


	2. Chapter 2

Damp.

That’s the first thing Nines is aware of. A strange pervasive damp of the sort he’d only encountered once or twice while travelling, because nowhere in his mother’s palace would even be in less than excellent keep nor would she tolerate being hosted by anyone who did not provide her and her people fitting accommodations.

The pain, oddly, comes second.

A dull ache through his limbs, every bone feeling stretched and joint feeling warped plus a numbness to his extremities.

None of this is right.

His last memories were in his chambers at Prince Regent Elijah’s castle, gazing out of the window and knowing that soon enough he would face his mother’s disappointment for walking out of the ball.

He shouldn’t have done it, he’d known that, he had a duty, but his impending marriage loomed dark on the horizon and he’d feared that a moment longer spent in Prince Gavin’s presence would have resulted in something truly regrettable.

There was something about his fiance that always seemed to fray the edges of the royal demeanour Nines had been taught since the earliest days of his youth. Perhaps it was simply that Gavin had been such a large part of the youth —every summer spent thrust together, Nines trying to carefully practise his manners on his fiance while Gavin just ran wild— that he’d learnt his way around Nines’ walls as fast as Nines had been able to build them, but the truly trying part was he never seemed to even try to be provoking, was so utterly indifferent to Nines. And the years hadn’t changed him

For a moment, while they’d been dancing he’d thought that perhaps Gavin had grown enough that even if neither of them would have chosen the match they could settle into something workable. The spark in his eyes had seemed more mischievous than mocking and though, as usual, he hadn’t graced Nines with the easy grin he bestowed to casually upon his friends, nor had he been scowling — face set in a soft frown that had struck Nines as melancholy, thoughtful.

Those hopes had been dashed quickly though, when at the first press Gavin had proved himself concerned not with how they could strengthen the union of their nations, nor even with how they could set aside their history to make the marriage tolerable. No. It seemed Prince Gavin had only been concerned with having a handsome husband, no doubt his mind was following the same valid lines as certain distasteful nobles of Nines’ own court who treated marriage as a completion as to who could win the richest and prettiest prize, with little regard for their spouses except as a trophy they could lord over their peers before returning to hunting and whoring and all of the other typical amusements of their set. Any depth Nines had seen in him clearly the product of wishful projection of the kind of husband he might have chosen if less bound by duty.

But the clearing around him is quite clearly not his chambers in the castle, nor is it any place that Nines thinks he’s ever seen.

He’ll learn nothing more on the ground, and so he starts to stand.

The movement is all wrong.

Years of learning that a royal must always be calm is the only thing that keeps the panic which floods his body to a surge of fear with no outward expression. Thrashing might worsen whatever is wrong with him and he shouldn't make noise until he knows more about where he is.

Is he injured?

No, he’s broken limbs before —three fingers, dropping a heavy book on his own hand as a child; an arm, fourteen and accepting Prince Gavin’s challenge to spar without knowing that while Nines’ mother schooled him on diplomacy and politics, Prince Elijah had made combat the focus of Gavin’s instruction and the first swing he’d made had shattered Nines’ inexperienced guard and sent him stumbling, whole bodyweight crashing painfully down on the arm not holding the sword; a leg, in the depths of midwinter but still the fault of Prince Gavin because Nines had been recalling stories he’d told of thrilling rides down snowy slopes as part of a list of all the reasons the winters were better than summers and the words had lingered and inspired Nines to try and replicate the experience even knowing that the true point of every one of Gavin’s reasons for admiring winter centred on Nines’ absence— and this feels nothing like that.

He tries to look at himself, to assess the damage, but his eyes can’t make sense of what’s in front of them, he looks where his body is and does not see a chest or legs or arms, the dislocation making nausea rise in his throat.

He rushes to the water, and stares at his reflection in horror.

It is not his own face looking back.

It is not even the face of a man.

The screech he lets out is becoming of one of his rank, but more significantly, it is inhuman.

It is a sound suited to the swan that stared back from his reflection.

“Now, now…”

Nines startles, spinning, still unbalanced by his new limbs as he takes in the sight of the man who seems to have appeared from nowhere. Dark haired and dour faced, around the age of Nines’ mother, and staring at him with a deeply unsettling hunger.

“Calm yourself, your highness,” there’s no respect in his tone as he looks down at Nines. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

Nines opens his mouth, about to call this stranger out for him impudence, but all that comes out is a strained honking sound.

The stranger’s smile is decidedly mocking as he says, “Patience.”

If Nines had his voice he’d ask what he’d demand to know what he ought to be waiting for, but he’s still struggling to think of a way to communicate when his vision whites out as his whole body warps with twisting pain, skin burning and every part of him stressed beyond human endurance, he convulses, the agony bringing him to the edge of his endurance. And then, just as abruptly as it had commenced, the feeling recedes, leaving him with the same all-over aches as before but once again in a body which is his own.

“Now, isn’t this more civilised, Prince Nines,” the stranger says, with a smile that looks like its trying to be friendly but cannot conceal its sinister origins. But now that his voice has returned to him, Nines will not allow this stranger to have the advantage of him.

“What is this?” Nines demands. “What do you want?” He wants to ask who the man is too, yet at the same time he’s certain that he should already know. There’s something strangely familiar about him.

“I want what I have always wanted,” the man says, face twisting and darkening. “What should rightfully be mine.”

There's a pause as Nines waits for an explanation of what that is, but it seems his kidnapper finds that response sufficient. Eventually Nines grows inpatient and asks, “Why have you taken me?” It seems more likely that his kidnapper will share this information than where, even though that’s what he truly wants to know.

“Because when you marry me—”

“What?”

It’s undignified, unbecoming, and probably unhelpful to interrupt the explanation he’s just asked for, but Nines thinks he’s entitled a little unprincely behaviour given the strangeness of the circumstances. He knows at once that it must be about seizing his kingdom, for some reason so many people wanted to lay claim to the burden which had weighed heavy on his shoulders, ever suit he’s ever had has been about that, from the betrothal to Prince Gavin that was part of Prince Elijah’s politicking to the startling number of individuals he’d encountered on his grand tour who thought he might be foolish enough to be seduced into an elopement. All of them seeking power without a grasp of the responsibility that came with it, all barring Prince Gavin who had no more choice in the arrangement than Nines had, and not one of them, including Prince Gavin, sparing a thought for the marriage as anything other than a means to an end. But his kidnapper can’t seriously think that Nines would agree to wed a man who’d snatched him from his chambers and ensorcelled him into the form of a swan.

“Why would I marry you?” Nines asks, trying to understand his captor’s madness. There was no gain into forcing him into the vows, they had no value without a witness and for someone in Nines’ position there would be expectations of the reliability of that witness in order for a marriage to be considered valid and any witness who’s testimony would be accepted by his people would be an opportunity for Nines to alert them to whatever force his kidnapper might attempt to use in order to get him to agree.

“I have my ways, your mother might call them dark arts,” the kidnappers says, and the mention of his mother sparks in Nines the realisation of where he recognises the man from.

He's aged since the portraits Nines had seen, although not as much as he ought to have, and the realisation of his captor’s identity makes Nines’ blood run cold.

Perkins.

If this is his mother's old enemy, far less vanquished than she has led her people to believe, then he is in grave danger indeed.

All vague thoughts of fighting or fleeing dissipating, Perkins’ dark magic no doubt giving him means to prevent such actions.

“Of course, once that’s done then I’ll free you from your curse,” Perkins continues, inattention to the way Nines’ mind is racing over possibilities. “I’ve no use for a husband who is a swan all day.”

It’s a feeble bribe. As if Nines would hand over the kingdom just like that. Anyway, if this is Perkins and capable of even half the evil Nines has been warned he embodies then Nines thinks he must know that once the deal is done he’d have no use at all for a husband who might undermine his rule. And even if he doesn’t just have Nines killed the thought of what uses Perkin’s might find for a husband, especially one he’s already revealed himself willing to curse for his own ends, it not a persuasive one.

“You can't think you'll get away with this,” he says. Perkins’ evil is widely known and even if he did manage to seize the throne the people would rise up against him and their allies would

Unless Perkins has ways to prevent that too. After all, it's been years since his last attempted takeover, more than enough time to scheme, and who knew what further forbidden arts he had acquired.

Perkins smiles. It’s not a friendly expression. “I already have a hold on you, and the rest will follow,” he says.

His confidence sparks Nines’ ire, burning away at a little of the helpless feeling that had overcome him upon first taking stock of his circumstances. If Perkin’s thinks him an easy prize he is going to suffer for the mistake.

“Of course, you’ll need time to get used to the idea,” Perkin’s continues. “You are your mother’s son, but I can be patient and I see no reason to make this unpleasant, and so the swan form takes hold only in the daylight hours,” he says. “After all, you’ll need your natural form if you are to accept my offer. But don’t get any ideas. The transformation into swan form will follow you everywhere, the transformation back to human can happen only on this lake in the moonlight, and if you miss a transformation there will be no second chances. You will live the rest of your life as a swan, and I shall take your mother’s kingdom the way I originally intended.”

One look into his eyes tells Nines that Perkins’ is serious about his threat. He might want Nines for his plans but if he has to sacrifice his plans to ensure that Nines cannot escape and suffers for the attempt then he will. Hardly surprising really, from a man who has been biding his time for long, plotting as long as Nines has been alive.

“I’ll leave you settle into your new home shall I?” Perkins’s voice drips with false hospitality and then, as if flaunting his dark powers, he vanishes with a sweep of his cloak.

What are the capabilities of dark magic, Nines wonders. The subject is so abhorred by his mother that he’s never even learnt the basic facts around it that might help him understand his enemy and combat him, Nines had a little training with a sword although he preferred to approach battles with strategy as opposed to the martial occupations Prince Gavin favoured, but even his little skill was useless without any grasp of what he was up against — a blow from a swan's wing was able to break a man's bones but who knew what dark arts might be supplementing Perkins’ natural strength.

And even if he did escape that was little use if he was returned to this form every sunrise or trapped in it forever should he fail to return to the lake.

The body of water Perkin’s claims to have bound the curse to is large, but not so grand that he cannot see all of its edges and on the far shore is a ruin of a castle, on that Nines suspects must be where Perkins has based himself, although he apparently expects Nines to reside on the water, living like the animal Perkins has cursed him to spend his daylight hours being.

But the castle is unfamiliar to him and there’s nothing else around but trees, no way of orienting himself.

He’s likely at least a day away from Prince Regent Elijah’s castle, judging by the fact his last memories before arriving here are of night and it had been approaching dusk again when he’d awoken, but for all he knows it could have been many days — to be unconsciousness that long through injury or illness would likely have lasting ill-effects that he’d be aware of, but given the sorcery Perkins has enacted upon him it hardly seems a stretch to imagine the man keeping him in a bespelled sleep to spirit him away.

He could flee recklessly now and hope to find people who might heed and pass on his warning of Perkins return but there was no certainty of that and, as far from his homeland as he almost certainly was, how would he find someone whose warnings his mother might heed rather than dismissing as the old paranoia about the forbidden arts, which had never fully died despite her best efforts after Perkins first exile.

And if he ventures too far he might not be able to make his way back to the lake before sunrise and, while he might save his people in the form of a swan, he could never lead them if he became trapped under the curse.

Of course, all of that assumes that Perkins was being truthful about his schemes.


	3. Chapter 3

It had seemed absurd at first, a servant gone into hysterics at failing to obey his queen's orders, but more servants had been dispatched to locate Nines or information of his last whereabouts, which had turned into a sweep of the castle and it was true, Nines was nowhere to be found.

After that, everything is a strange mix of activity, guards being summoned and people being called to account for Nines’ last known whereabouts while at the same time it’s quite clear that nobody yet wants to let on that they’ve lost track of an entire prince.

While everybody is trying to work out where Nines is, Gavin makes his way through the castle to the one place that he certainly isn’t.

Nobody is around as he pushes into Nines’ room, feeling oddly like he was intruding, the bedchamber somewhere intimate, then had to remind himself that this was his castle and the feeling was absurd.

The first thing that struck him was the tidiness, the rooms cleaner that Gavin's ever were even freshly after the servants had been through. The room looked like it's occupant was just out for tea, Nines clothes were hanging in the wardrobe, his unpacked trunks rested in the corner of the room.

Gavin didn’t know how much luggage Nines had brought, it was possible that he’d simply brought a lot, but Gavin didn’t think so. No, from the state of the room it seemed as though Nines had left without bothering to pack.

That was good news then. If he’d taken nothing with him, his sulk was likely confined to the castle grounds or, at the furthest, the nearby town. All this panic and he’d probably be back later today, haughty and unruffled. And no doubt Gavin would be blamed for his departure and all the alarm caused even though he’d hardly made Nines leave without a note.

Curiosity sated, he turned to leave the room, then paused. The lamp by the door looked like it had burned out despite the fact it had little call to have been lit at all at this time of year when the sun rose early and lingered in pinks and reds long into the night. That was… odd. There was no reason for the lamp to have been in use long enough to have burned out and for Nines to have departed without extinguishing the flame would be uncharacteristically careless — a lamp left burning unattended was not just wasteful but a fire hazard, especially when the window was wide open so a breeze might knock it over.

The wide open window.

Gavin turned back to the room. An open window wasn’t peculiar in the summer, but Nines window was flung wide and unanchored, left to swing back and forth in the frame.

That wasn’t right.

The beginnings of a disturbing notion building in his head, Gavin looked at the room with fresh eyes.

There was no obvious sign of a struggle but it had been almost a full day since anyone had last seen Nines, sweeping out of the ball, and when they'd realised he was gone, servants could quite easily have come through and cleaned up some evidence of a disturbance without realising it wasn't ordinary mess.

The clothes he was wearing at the ball were nowhere to be seen, had they been taken to launder or was he still wearing them?

Cursing to himself Gavin realised that every servant would need to be questioned again — this time not asking where Nines was but when they’d last had contact with him and what they might have seen or done in his room that would alter the evidence.

Because this wasn’t the room of a man sulking somewhere, Gavin was incredibly familiar with what that looked like, this was the room of a man who had been taken.

When he told Elijah, his half-brother had laughed. Laughed and said he’d never known Gavin to be such a panicky hen. Jealous of whoever Nines had run off to, he’d suggested, and the notion was so absurd that Gavin had given up talking to his brother and had approached Nines’ mother, who’d no doubt have a little more concern for her son’s whereabouts.

Queen Amanda had dismissed him without even bothering to hear him out past his initial statements.

So he’d gone to the one person he could always rely on.

Tina stares.

“Kidnapped?!”

“He’s definitely gone,” Gavin says. They’d had people searching the castle grounds all night and not of a trace of him had turned up. Right now people were making a discrete investigation of the town but if Nines didn’t turn up soon, and Gavin was sure now that he wouldn’t, they’d have to stop trying to keep Nines’ absence quiet and conduct a full search.

“Maybe he just... left.” Tina grimaces. “You did have that fight.”

Gavin shakes his head. “So he called me an idiot, but he's always thought I was an idiot.” If that was going to make him run away he'd have done it before now. “You said so yourself.”

Tina bites her lip. “Well, maybe I was wrong.”

Which was bullshit. Tina knew Nines almost as well as he did, she hadn't been allowed to travel with him as a child but she'd been at Gavin's side every other summer when Nines had come to them and ought to be a respectable judge of his character.

“No, the Queen wanted it and it would have benefited his kingdom.” Gavin knows his own weaknesses, Nines isn’t the only person to call himself selfish and Gavin was the type who would have run away if he'd been unwilling to go through with the match, but that’s exactly how he knows that Nines wouldn’t. Unlike Gavin, Nines was the perfect dutiful prince, obedient to his mother and putting his country before himself. “As long as they wanted him to, there’s nothing that would have stopped him from marrying me. He might have hated every minute of it, might have hated me, but he’d have grit his teeth and done it.”

As he’d got older he’d started to realise that was the worst thing about their betrothal, as a youth he’d chafed under the pressure of the expectation and the lack of choice but he’d always known that if he really wanted to he could run away. The knowledge that Nines wouldn’t say no even if he wanted to was far sourer.

Tina still looks doubtful.

And it turns out, prevailing opinion is with her.

The eventual conclusion is that Nines has most likely decided to return home without notice and Queen Amanda leaves with her entourage a few days later, her parting words making it perfectly clear her disgust with Gavin for apparently driving her son to this but also her disdain for Nines at shirking his duty.

But all it does is make Gavin more convinced than ever than Nines’ departure was not a willing one. Queen Amanda is fearsomely cold and while he assumes she’s less frosty with her son it still seems unlikely that Nines has simply run home where he’ll face his mother’s anger when she returns, and that only leaves being taken or running somewhere other than his home.

A theory which seems like it is confirmed when, some days after Queen Amanda's departure, they receive a missive confirming that Nines had not, as most people had theorised, returned to his family's Palace and his whereabouts remained unknown.

But no one will fucking listen to Gavin.

He'd been willing to acknowledge that there might be some sense to the guess that Nines had gone home given the ambiguity of the evidence that had led Gavin to conclude it was a kidnapping; but it's downright absurd when, having been proved incorrect, they move on to suggestions of where else Nines could have run to, even though it goes utterly against reason to suggest that Nines might have abandoned his kingdom to go live as a hermit in the woods.

So Nines is missing and nobody, not even his own mother who announces that her heir will either return promptly or she'll break the family line and appoint another who will uphold the duties of the position, is looking for him.

Except Gavin, who storms over to his old schoolroom and gathers the books on politics and history he'd never bothered to study from and tries to figure out who has the most to gain from Nines absence because there has been no random demand or message indicating that Nines is being used as a hostage to leverage a negotiation which means the most likely motive is somebody wanting him out of the way.

It turns out, that’s a lot of people.

When Gavin finds Nines he’s going to have him appointed a protection detail. Honestly, it doesn’t make sense that he doesn’t have one already what with the number of people Queen Amanda has apparently pissed off. She might be willing to be careless with her son, but Gavin isn’t going to tolerate the chance of his husband getting assassinated.

The most likely suspect would be could be someone in Queen Amanda's court, after all if Nines is gone too long she's already made clear she has no qualms about appointing a new heir and a shot at the throne might motivate many people to malice. Gavin is hoping that’s not who though, it will be far harder to investigate if that is true, especially since he doesn’t have the Queen’s co-operation, and staking that hope on the fact that if one of Amanda’s people wanted to get rid of Nines then surely they’d do it on their home turf rather than waiting until now.

And there's also their neighbours, especially those who might feel threatened by Gavin and Nines’ union combining the might of their two kingdoms into a land that no other in the region could stand against — which was undoubtedly Elijah and Amanda’s goal but certainly hadn’t helped international relations with other kingdoms.

He researches for three days before Tina seeks him out, pulling the book right out of his hands.

“What are you doing?” she says. “I’ve barely seen you in days.”

Gavin scowls. “What do you think?” he huffs.

Tina shrugs, but then looks down at the book and says, “History?”

“It turns out that there are whole lot people who are going to gain from Nines’ disappearance,” Gavin says, “Directly and indirectly.” It makes it incredibly hard to narrow down a suspect pool.

“Oh…” she frowns. “You still think he was taken.”

“Of course I do,” Gavin snaps. “I’ve already told you, all the evidence points to it.”

Tina sighs, pity in her eyes. “Gavin, you’re the only one who thinks that.”

“You don’t believe me?!”

“No, I…” Tina grimaces. “It’s not that I don’t believe you. It is suspicious, you’re right about that, but everybody else seems to think he left willingly and—”

“And if everybody else is wrong?” Gavin snaps. “If he left unwillingly and nobody is even bothering to search for him because they’ve got their heads too far up their own asses to see that what they’re saying makes no sense?!”

Tine pauses. “I suppose it would be better to know for sure,” she concedes. “Do you have any real leads yet?”

“No,” Gavin admits. “There’s too much information to sort through, and Queen Amanda’s people are still trying to keep the whole thing hush hush, as if nobody is going to notice that Nines suddenly isn’t showing up for official events, and they certainly aren’t talking to me. I’m hoping that they’re investigating internally,” Queen Amanda has always struck him as cold but surely as Nines’ mother she must want to be certain that he’s safe, “But they seem so convinced he’s just bailed that I can’t even be sure of that.”

Pulling out the chair beside him, Tina takes a seat, running her finger down the pile of books. “So you’re just going to read all of these in hopes of a clue?”

It’s not a good plan, Gavin knows that, he’d much rather be out scouring the city, but he needs a background if he’s going to do this right instead of just running around aimlessly and risking whoever has taken Nines going deeper into hiding.

“I’ll help you,” Tina says slowly, and Gavin feels his heart start to lift at the prospect of an ally. “But Gavin, if we find him and it turns out he did leave willingly...”

Gavin takes in Tina's worried frown and feels his stomach turn. “If the thought of marrying me is so bad he'd give up his kingdom to avoid it then I'll give up searching and tell them we couldn’t find him,” he assures her.

Hell, if it came to that he’d go through with his own boyhood scheme to run off, that way Nines could return to his own kingdom and put the blame for the failed engagement on Gavin. The match had been thrust upon both of them but, although he’d made plans to run, Gavin had never seriously considered acting upon them, which is why it’s so strange that nobody else is sceptical about the fact things were so bad that Nines would feel like he had to flee his home when Nines was by far the more dutiful of the two of them. He’d always assumed that Nines found Gavin about as annoying as he found Nines and was proceeding with the same teeth gritted tolerance Gavin was because there was no getting around the fact that the match between them brought too many benefits to their people to be broken off just to avoid an irritating spouse, but if the idea of marrying Gavin is so abhorrent to Nines then Gavin wants nothing to do with it and he certainly doesn’t want Nines marrying him solely because it’s the only way to keep his kingdom.

Gavin has spent pretty much his whole preparing for a grudging marriage, but he won’t be party to a forced one and he tells Tina so.

And just like that, he has a research ally.


	4. Chapter 4

Research eats into Gavin’s days and before he knows it, it’s late July already. He’d expected the summer to be a whirl of wedding preparations, unable to get away from Nines as they prepared to be bound together, but instead Nines is gone and everyone except Gavin seems to have given up on finding him and with every flip of the calendar Gavin fears the odds of succeeding at his self-appointed quest grow lower.

He wants to dedicate himself to his search, but with his coming of age approaching nearly as soon as his wedding out to have been, Elijah insists on demanding Gavin dedicate more and more of his time to his kingdom.

There are meetings and debates and court sessions, and Gavin can only get out of so many.

This week it’s a hunt and he’s managed to excuse himself from the pursuit itself on the grounds that he’s always found the sport tedious, he’d tried it as a teen he’s never seen the point of pitting himself against an animal, there’s no challenge in that, he’s prised away from his maps and his theories at sundown and made to present himself at the celebration of the day’s sport.

The feast is tolerable. The castle cooks have done faultless work, as always, but, with his intended absence, it seems whoever organised the particulars was at a loss as to whom to seat with Gavin.

To his right is Archduke Leon of Westlake, who is only a few years older than Gavin, interested in martial affairs and sport, he can see why somebody might think there was grounds for conversation, but the man is also a total sycophant, which made for tedious dinner company. Though he still might be preferable to the countess of Threefen who manages to turn every thread of discussion to her three daughters —all apparently the ideal of feminine grace, intellect, and beauty— which is deeply unfortunate as sitting opposite Gavin is the newly ascended Viscountess Ashvine who is all of sixteen and visibly unused to court functions, blushing whenever dressed and fumbling her cutlery and obviously acutely aware of how she comes up short next to the Countess’ depictions as she practically flees once the meal and people move through to the drawing room. Gavin’s is a little envious of her actually, he’d like nothing more than to be able to escape the tedium but he knows that if he doesn’t indulge some of Elijah’s demands to present himself at formal occasions then Elijah will make everything Gavin wants to do excessively inconvenient.

Once upon a time, he dealt with boring engagements by bitching to Tina afterwards, but even that’s lost a little of its joy because Tina is the only one reluctantly helping him search for Nines and he can’t forget that not only are Elijah’s mandatory public appearances time away from the search but every moment he spends dwelling on them is wasted too. Still, he can’t think right when he’s so overfed and frustrated.

“Urgh, what a loser,” Gavin groans, after the feast is over. “Did you hear him ‘yes your highness, of course your highness’ Nines would have scoffed in my face before I’d even got half a sentence out.”

Tina opens her mouth, pauses, and then says, lightly, “You’re probably right, he always was so careful in balancing formal address with the fact your ranks were equal.” Too lightly. Before she would have teased him about the way Nines knocking Gavin down without ever breaking etiquette was a sign he was too easy a target for mockery.

“And once we find him we can get back to normal,” Gavin reminds her. Nines might have been trying company, but he’ll take trying over tedious any day.

“Gavin, I know you like to involve yourself with the castle security a lot,” Tina says, “But even if he has been taken, that isn’t really your job and it isn’t your fault.”

“I thought you said you had my back on this,” Gavin points out. Over the past weeks she ridden out many times to follow the leads he’s uncovered and this is the first time she’s raised an objection. “Don’t tell me you’re getting cold feet just because we didn’t get instant results.”

“I do have your back, asshole. I’m helping you, and I will keep helping you,” she says. “But, you’re worrying people. Regardless of what happened to Nines, your coronation is in a few months. The people need to see that you’re prepared to rule, not ignoring your duties and chasing—”

“Chasing what?” he snaps. He’s heard it all already —a man who rejected him, the security of joining with a foreign power, somebody to rule for him, a_ ghost_— but which Tina choses will reveal just how much of her support is faked.

“Chasing a personal matter,” she says, firmly. “You can’t neglect your responsibilities. Nines wouldn’t have wanted you to serve your country poorly.”

Gavin sighs. She’s not wrong, Nines would want him to prioritise his people, but perhaps if Nines had stood up for his own inclinations a little more they wouldn’t all be in a position where his kidnap is being denied due to the belief he’s been driven to fleeing an unwanted betrothal rather than just saying no, the benefit for his people doesn’t change the fact he doesn’t want to.

“And I suppose you think he wants to be missing?”

“Gavin...” Tina says softly and he knows right away what she's thinking.

Tina might be humouring Gavin’s insistence that Nines didn’t just bail on the engagement, but if somebody wants Nines out of the way the most efficient way to achieve that would involve a dead Prince not one held prisoner somewhere, but if whoever is behind this wanted to murder Nines they could have done it in the castle and left his body to be found so that proof of death would push Amanda to appoint a new heir.

Of course then there would have been a murder investigation whereas as long as Nines is just absent people are stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that the whole situation is suspicious as hell, but until Gavin has proof otherwise he's determined to believe in the chance that his fiance may still be alive.

And so he researches.

And the more he researches the more the evidence seems to point in one direction. Queen Amanda has a strained history with practitioners of magic, had cracked down hard on all of them after her former courtier Lord Perkins had attempted to use sorcery to overthrow her, and enchantment would certainly go a long way to explaining how whoever took Nines was able to infiltrate the castle, overpower Nines, and spirit him away, all without a single alarm being raised.

And Gavin might not know shit about sorcery but Elijah had always claimed that the forbidden arts were more dangerous than dark and has assembled a considerable private library on the subject — all Gavin needs to do is get access.

When he asks, Elijah shuts him down hard.

“Day after day, all you ever do now is search for him,” Elijah says. “It’s time to accept he’s gone. Weather by his own free will or through this external force you seem to believe in is irrelevant.

“The heir of our nearest neighbours and allies potentially being kidnapped is irrelevant?” Gavin says. He’s had too many arguments with too many people about if Nines left or was taken to be surprised by Elijah’s doubt, but his indifference to the political implications is absurd.

“Irrelevant to you,” Elijah amends. “How Amanda choses to address her sudden lack of heir is not a matter we need to involve ourselves in.”

“You arranged this engagement, why don’t you care that it’s broken?”

“Because Amanda’s inability to control her heir is not my responsibility. But you are, and to me this looks like another version of your games of soldiers,” Elijah says. “It’s been weeks and it is time for you to think of the interests of the kingdom. Such as sitting in on the court session that’s about to start.”

So he doesn’t get access to Elijah’s library, but whatever. Gavin had already known that Elijah didn’t approve of his search for Nines despite the fact it was Elijah who’d wanted him to marry the other Prince. Spite makes him ignore the session, even though Elijah is right about the fact he ought to be paying attention. But it’s not like Elijah is just going to bail the moment Gavin is crowned, he’ll still be there to help run things, especially if Gavin can’t located Nines in time and has to ascend the throne without a more politically minded partner.

But he will.

Gavin’s spent his whole life

And there’s too much unsaid between them.

‘What else?’ Nines had asked and the question has haunted Gavin ever since Nines vanished..

Well, what else was there? Apart from his appearance nothing much had changed. He was still Nines, smarter than anyone else Gavin knows, superficially stuffy but Gavin has years of summer memories as proof that he could be hilariously mean if provoked, the one person who really had the capacity to understand the weight of duty resting of Gavin’s shoulders even if Nines bore it so much better.

There are days trying to understand Nines is almost enough to distract him from his research but Gavin has to believe that once he finds Nines he’ll be able to get answers first hand and that there has to be something, in the books or in the messages he’s received, pouring over reports of news and gossip and rumour from every barrack and town and farming hamlet until--

There! Reports of strange thefts in a town near the forest, items going missing even when watchman stood a constant guard. Suspicious as hell and consistent with his theory that magic is somehow involved. It’s flimsy, doesn’t give him much to work with, but no flimsier than any of the other leads Gavin has chased down over the past months and something in his gut says this is the right approach — that this is far more complex than simple political manoeuvring.

Political manoeuvring he could investigate himself instead of having to have another conversation with Tina about his priorities except for the fact that tomorrow he’s obliged to attend another party, hosting the freshly out of mourning Dowager Duchess of Lannar, who has ruled in her husband’s stead for years but will need to marry again if she wants to continue having power of her own, which probably explains why she’s delving back into court life, after all there are they’re still hosting the Archduke of Westlake, who would be a respectable step up for the dowager, and if her tastes ran younger then the Countess of Threefen’s son had plenty of sisters to act as heir if he married older for power, in fact the palace is a veritable buffet of potential suitors and has been since Elijah started flinging invitations far and wide to distract from the scandal of Nines’ vanishing and…

Gavin’s stomach drops with realisation.

Oh, damn Elijah to hell.

People all but jump out of his way as he storms through the castle, making his way to the south tower that holds Elijah’s study. It’s not a route he walks often, not a route anybody walks often outside of Elijah because the regent is private about what he does there but Gavin probably has a right to enter, just as he does every other room of the castle, since he’s the heir and Elijah’s power is supposed to be a by-product of serving as his regent. It’s never been a place he’s been interested in going, so he’d never minded that it was also unofficially prohibited to all except those Elijah invited but now he wants a word with his step brother so he ignores the way the guards outside the door startle and reach for the weapons before they recognise him and still don’t relax as he approaches.

Gavin is mere months from being King. They would be stupid to stop him.

He slams the door open, marching into the room.

The study isn’t a pleasant room. It has only one window and the shades are drawn, the place lit instead by a wasteful number of candles, and there’s a strange aroma to the place that Gavin puts down to the fact the window is never opened. Or possibly the horrible specimens Elijah has lining his room. It’s not that Gavin really minds his half-brother’s dedication to esoteric fields of study, but he wishes they didn’t always have to be so disturbing. Preserved creatures of yore reflect his most recent fascination and so whole shelves of musty tomes have been cleared since the last time Gavin was summoned here and replaced with bones and the preserved remains of beasts extinct so long they’re fading into myth.

But little though he likes the smell, Elijah had always wanted knowledge that others lacked and that was best found in forbidden or revolting fields, so Gavin’s too used to Elijah’s collections to be disturbed by the sight.

Infuriatingly, Elijah seems unperturbed by his entrance, carefully sliding a marker between the pages of the book he stands over before turning his attention to Gavin.

“I wasn’t expecting—”

Gavin cuts him off. He knows Elijah wasn’t expecting him, knows Elijah would much rather Gavin stayed out of his way unless he was needed because Gavin might be their heir but that didn’t make him well suited to governance, but he draws the line and being kept out of the way because Elijah has thrown him into a viper pit of social climbing minor nobles who thought it would be to their advantage to snare a prince — even, or perhaps especially, a mad one.

“Tell me you haven’t been promising all these people you’re throwing at me a shot at the throne,” he hisses. If Elijah wasn’t still regent Gavin would shake him. What the fuck is he thinking?

“Of course I haven’t been so stupid as to promise anybody anything, but I’m glad you grasp my intentions.”

Glad. He’s going to be getting Gavin’s fist in his face in a minute and treason be damned. “Why the fuck would you do that?”

“You need to marry somebody,” Elijah says, sounding bored, “We need to strengthen alliances and a spouse will help cement your place as ruler.”

Which was to say that nobody trusted Gavin to reign without somebody with a greater sense of propriety beside him to rein him in.

But that still didn’t justify the people Elijah was throwing at him.

“I am going to marry somebody,” Gavin points out. “And that somebody is my goddamn fiance!”

Elijah rolls his eyes. “Gavin, he left you.”

“He was kidnapped!” Gavin had explained the evidence to Elijah a dozen times and yet his brother continues to drive him mad by dismissing it as some crackpot theory despite the fact kidnap made far more sense than the prevailing theory that Nines abandoned his duties and ran off into the night in full formal-wear without in packing or even any sign of making a plan.

“He’s not here,” Elijah says. “And, Gavin, really. We both know he never wanted you. The amount of times I had to persuade Amanda not to renege on our deal after she realised that she could find a far better match for him even if doing so was less convenient… it’s hardly a surprise that Nines worked out the same thing for himself.”

They’d thought about breaking the engagement? The revelation stumps Gavin momentarily. He’d certainly never seen any indicator of such a thing, the kingdoms steadily combining for as long as he could remember, and for a moment he wondered when it was that Queen Amanda had decided he wasn’t good enough for her son but then he shakes himself out of his thoughts. Elijah is derailing him. “Then could have stayed here and just refused, or he’d have gone to his mother and asked her to arrange things, not just vanished without a trace.”

“Gavin…” Elijah's tone, as if speaking to a particularly slow child, is all too familiar.

“I’m marrying Nines,” Gavin cuts in with a shake of his head. “So stop wasting your efforts and these people’s time by throwing them at me.”

“And if he won’t have you?” There’s something mean in Elijah’s tone and for a moment Gavin mistakes it for knowing, but no, if Elijah knew where Nines was he would say so, it would be politically advantageous to him.

“Then he can tell me so himself,” Gavin says. “And until then I’ll search for as long as I need to.”


	5. Chapter 5

Captivity, Nines finds, is largely an exercise in tedium.

He sleeps for most of the days and stays awake at night. It means enduring Perkins’ sporadic visits; but he suspects that if he deigned to try and sleep through one of those, the odious little man would just wake him, and so it’s only sensible that he arranges things so that his waking hours are spent in human form, especially at this time of year when the nights are so short.

At first he explores the woods, carefully minding the time so that that he’s always back at the lake before risking finding out if Perkin’s was bluffing about the curse becoming permanent, but he finds no signs of civilisation or even hints of human presence in the vicinity that might spur him to risk testing the curses bounds.

A few times he does nap during the night, once he’s confident that Perkins isn’t going to drop in and once again explain how this could all be over if Nines would only co-operate with his schemes, and attempts exploring in his swan form but those searches are just a fruitless and after a few run-ins with forest predators he abandons that plan. It’s senseless to risk the danger when, even if he did find signs of life, he’d still have to return to the lake and then find them again in human form since he cannot solicit aid as a swan, nor risk being delayed and trapped under the curse.

It doesn’t take long for it become clear that his best hope lies with Perkins.

Not in co-operating with the man, Nines would sooner die than hand his kingdom and his people over to somebody like that, but knowledge of sorcery might reveal how he can break the curse or at least allow him to better understand the limits of his confinement and exploit them.

It’s surprisingly easy to follow Perkins after one of his visits, back to the fortress the man has made his base. He’s utterly unwary and Nines feels insulted that Perkins hasn’t even considered he might do this as he creeps through the building until he locates a room that must be Perkins’ study.

There’s book after book, no time to go through them all to find what he needs but Nines has always loved libraries and he knows how to pick out frequented shelves and well-thumbed books within a collection.

Soon enough he has a pile of recently uses tomes in front of him. He skims them quickly, flipping past pages of spells about appearance and copying and nonsense love charms until in the third book he finds a chapter illustrated with pictures of swans.

The language is dense, clearly meant for somebody who has already mastered the subject matter, but Nines pushes through. There are passages that make little sense but he’s confident he’s following the core meaning - he knows fundamentals of magic already because his mother has always abhorred magic, but in passing on her fear she’d also passed on some knowledge. What he doesn’t understand relates more to the practicalities of conducting rituals, and since he’s only trying to understand, not practise dark arts, that’s unimportant.

Unfortunately, every word he reads suggests that what Perkins has told him is true, that the curse is bound to one location and to the moonlight and that, if Nines oversteps the bonds of his enchantments and is caught away from the lake when the moon is not in the sky then the transformation will become permanent. There’s one note, a flowery aside at the bottom of the page that claims that the curse can be broken by ‘true love’s vow’ but Nines dismisses that as absurd - his mother has always taught him of the foolish lies and false promises of magic.

She’d also taught him that spells can be undone by killer their caster. Nines doesn’t actually know if that’s true, but it seems like his strongest chance — find help, have Perkin’s executed, and hope his true form is returned to him. It’s a drastic course of action, but as the weeks have crawled by without any hint of rescue or safer way to free himself from Perkin’s control it’s a risky he may have to take.

There’s a small sound behind him.

Nines jerks up, spinning around to see Perkins standing in the doorway. Smiling far too calmly.

“Oh my, my, my, today is shaping up to be filled with troublesome little fools, isn’t it?”

Beside Perkins is a figure in familiar, the armour of his fiancé's knights, there's something off about it but Nines is distracted by the sudden rush of hope. If Prince Gavin’s people have wandered close enough to stumble into Perkins there must be an outpost nearby that he’d missed in his searches -- if Nines can only find his way out of this place then he might be able to get help.

“No wonder Elijah needed my help to keep his brother from inheriting when your mother never taught you to mind your own business,” Perkins continues to mutter, “And he can't even keep the brat from sending his people to meddle where they've no business being. But you can both wait here for now. Your foolish meddling hardly matters when I’m on the cusp of victory.”

It's then that Nines realises what is strange about the armour -- it's every bit that of a decorated young Knight except for the insignia which actually indicates being knighted by the sitting ruler. This isn't one of Prince Elijah's people, this is one of Prince Gavin's.

Sure enough, as the door slams closed behind Perkins, the knight’s hands come up and the helmet is lifted away to reveal Tina. The intimate address in his head is inappropriate, but it’s a habit picked up half from hearing Prince Gavin refer to her in that casual way since childhood and because he’s never sure if she ought to be Lady Chen, the address she’s entitled to through her father, or Sir Chen, because knights prefer to be addressed by their earned title and, while she hadn’t been formally knighted she’d passed all the training and it was blatant that the moment Prince Gavin were crowned she’d be given the role of first female knight.

Fortunately, he’s spared having to navigate that point of etiquette as Tina skips all formalities to blurt out: “Holy fuck, Gavin was right!”

Nines blinks. “Pardon?”

“You really were taken,” she says. “And to think, everyone was saying Gavin had gone mad, searching for you like he was.”

“Are you implying that Prince Gavin has insisted leading the searches?” Nines asks. He knows it’s Gavin’s kingdom and that he’s likely an adequate tracker, but he’d have expected his mother to insist that her people were given precedence. And given the political and sorcerous nature of his capture, it’s also a surprise that it’s not in the hands of an expert in those areas. Prince Gavin is undeniably a capable solider, but he seems ill-suited to a task

Tina shakes her head. “Gavin _is_ the searches. Well, Gavin and me.” She shrugs a little awkwardly. “Of course, now I know Elijah was apparently in on it I suppose he was the one encouraging the rumours in order to discourage anybody helping Gavin.”

“What rumours?” Nines asks. It’s one thing to believe that Prince Elijah might be conspiring with Perkins, but to convince his mother to abandon him? How could he have possibly?

“Most people thought you’d just run away,” Tina explains. “But Gavin said you had too strong a sense of responsibility to your kingdom to do that even if you were unhappy, and that the whole scene was fishy, so he insisted on looking for you.”

Nines stares.

Surely his mother wouldn't have thought he'd abandoned his country? And his people, think he’d abandon them? What has he ever done to give such a disloyal impression? And of all the people to be the one to hold fast to the conviction that Nines would never do such a thing, Prince Gavin is the last person Nines would have suspected of understanding him so deeply.

“Surely there were others who must have realised I would not desert my country,”

Tina’s expression does not inspire confidence. “I agreed with Gavin that the circumstances were… odd,” she says slowly. “But I thought that you might have faked it to cover your tracks. Most other people held the same beliefs. That you’d fled in a hurry and just decided that getting away was more important than packing and risking being caught. And all things considered…”

Nines glares. “What consideration would possibility justify of accusing me of an action all but treasonous?”

Tina grimaces, “Well, y’know...”

No, Nines does not know. What error could he have possibly made that would have caused people to believe he'd abandon his people in such an egregious manner? “I believe it would be better if I knew _exactly _why my people thought I would desert them.” And he hopes fiercely that it is an error he can rectify, that whatever led to him unknowingly losing the trust of a whole nation can be mended and that he will not have to rule knowing his subjects have no faith in him.

“To get out of marrying Gavin,” Tina says, as it's obvious. “I mean, he's my best friend but even I’d be a little...” she waves her hand in a gesture of uncertainty, nose wrinkling. “And you've never exactly made a secret of the fact that you wouldn't marry him if your mother wasn't forcing you.”

Wouldn't he? Nines had never considered the possibility, marrying Gavin was like summer following spring, something too inevitable to spare a thought for. Refusal... The idea was alien. When Nines had thought of how their married life might be he’d often struggled to think around the challenges that would be involved in arranging things comfortably for both of their disparate preferences, but never that they wouldn't be married.

“I have always tried to display the proper decorum towards my fiance,” Nine defends. “It is Prince Gavin that has a history of publicly speaking against me.”

“Well yeah, but Gavin is a bit of an ass to everyone,” Tina says with a shrug. “Whereas your etiquette is perfect, which makes it obvious that all the little ways you show disapproval of Gavin are personal dislike.”

It was true that Prince Gavin, with his wild laugh and mischievous eyes, the way he provoked in Nines feelings no-one else could, and that for most of his adolescence Nines has firmly classified those feelings as irritation, but he’d thought he’d been discrete about all of his emotions, he’d never imagined that people would see his conflict and take it for such a passionate dislike that he’d abandon not just his fiance but his throne. “I…”

“It's alright you know,” Tina rests a gauntleted hand on his arm. “I don't blame you, he and I talked about this, that if we found you and it turned out you had run away -- that we'd not tell anyone where you were if you didn't want us to, or come up with some reason to stop the marriage without it being your fault so that you can go home.”

“I didn’t run,” Nines protests, innards twisting at the idea of anyone being convinced enough that there was a chance his departure had been willing that they’d felt the need to prepare contingencies. That even Gavin, apparently the one person who had doubted he’d run didn’t completely trust that belief.

“Well yeah, but it seems like a good time to say, when we get out of here we could still do that,” she offers. “Gavin planned himself an out years ago, in case he decided he needed it, if you felt like you couldn't disappoint your mother we could do that and get you out of it without anyone blaming you.”

Nines’ stomach twists. Gavin planning to abandon his kingdom in order to avoid the marriage, that lines up with all of his worst judgements of the man, but that Gavin apparently had a viable plan for years and, despite his railing against the prospect of their marriage, had never taken the out is mystifying. Nines dismisses the rest of what Tina said though - the suggestion that Gavin would step away from his position, risking losing the throne forever in the process, simply to ensure Nines’ happiness, can only be Tina misunderstanding her friend. And he’d never ask it. The marriage is a shared burden to bear, as their kingdoms ought to be. Nines knows himself to be capable of ruling without assistance, but he’d rather have the known challenges that Gavin brought to the table with his difficult personality than the ominous offer to ascend the throne alone.

He’s about to explain all that to Tina when the door clangs open.

Perkins is back.

And smiling, oily and horrifying.

“Your highness,” he says, more affable than he’s been since the early days of Nines’ capture. “Are you sure you won’t reconsider my offer? Final chance.”

“I won’t marry you,” Nines says. They’ve been over this a dozen times. The danger he poses to Nines’ people is too great, there’s nothing else Perkins can threaten that would outweigh that. “You will never take my kingdom through me.”

“Very well, but you see I’ve also been working on a plan B,” Perkins says with a sickening smirk, sidestepping to reveal that he’s not alone.

Behind him stands Nines.

“You see, your highness,” Perkins drawls. “Your presence was necessary to perfect this step, but now I can do without your co-operation. It would have been better for you if you had accepted my plan, but my creation here can take your place now. And it is so much more compliant.”

“It’s an abomination,” Tina mutters. And Nines can’t help but agree. Though with a closer look he can see that the copy is not quite perfect, close enough to fool someone from a distance but anybody who knew him would realise - the eyes are dark and this impostor is shorter and softer featured. Before hope can set in though, Perkins continues.

“Of course there are little bits of corruption, it turns out that when you make a creature from the earth it’s almost impossible to keep them from having mud brown eyes and that’s such a giveaway,” Perkins says. “But, he’s been studying you from a distance while I’ve had you here and his imitation is flawless, now all he needs is a little--”

Perkins flicks his wrist, murmuring a low incantation, and…

And oh. Now the fake is truly his mirror image. Even his own mother would be fooled. Nines himself might be fooled, might have thought he’d gone mad, if he hadn’t seen Perkins cast the spell.

“Poor foolish Elijah,” Perkins sneers. “He thought that Amanda was the greatest threat to his power, that she would use you to puppet that hot-headed brother of his and deprive Elijah of the power of doing it himself.”

Beside him, Tina snorts quietly, and Nines can’t help but agree. The notion of anyone puppeting Prince Gavin is absurd — his brother and ruler had barely managed to force basic civility out of him in all the years Nines had visited them and whenever Nines shared Gavin’s company they had never seemed to manage more than endless looping bickering.

“If only your mother were as smart as I am. Now, Prince Gavin will marry my puppet and once he’s been disposed of, King “Nines” here will rule both kingdoms and be free to pass them onto me,” Perkins says. His smile, always cruel, takes on a vindictive edge as he leans close to Nines. “If you’d co-operated you could have played this part yourself, and I might have let you live, but, alas…”

“Why not just do that to begin with,” Nines says. Kidnapping and putting an impostor in his place is a plausible plan, but holding him under the curse for so long doesn’t seem like it’s served any purpose.

Perkins shrugs. “My creation is your perfect image, but it doesn’t have your mind. Studying you has helped, but if your mother had stayed she might have spotted the deception. But the marriage will be completed before she returns, and then it will be too late.”

“You don’t think anybody else will notice some fake in the place of somebody they’ve known for years?” Tina says. “Gavin won’t marry that thing.”

Perkins laughs. “Elijah has told me all about his self-absorbed fool of a brother,” he dismisses. “We couldn’t have asked for an easier mark. Though it’s better that we hurry things along before he sticks that ugly nose of his in where it’s not invited and accidentally discovers something of worth.”

He laughs, leaving with the impostor and Nines watches with dread. Perkins thinks Prince Gavin will be easily duped by the impostor. A few hours ago, Nines might have agreed. But now he knows that Gavin was the only one who understood him well enough to see through Perkins’ initial ruse? No, whatever Perkins has heard from the Prince Regent, it clearly has him underestimating Gavin. Which means that Gavin might not fall for his plans, but who knew what Perkins would do if foiled.

Tina is muttering under her breath, a stream of foul language that Nines knows his mother could condemn as both un-knightly and unladylike, but which he finds himself agreeing with.

“Fuckity shitballs, goddamnit,” she hisses, kicking at the wall. “Great, now we’re gonna have to wait until Gavin realises that something is up and mounts a rescue. And if Prince Elijah has an active interest in stopping him doing that then he might not even have backup. What a shit-show this is turning out to be. Almost makes me wish you have just decided Gavin makes shitty husband material.”

Nines raises an eyebrow. “We’re standing in the study of the most feared sorcerer in both our kingdoms as he plans to seize power of them, and you only _almost_ wish for a more petty dilemma.”

Tina shrugs. “He’s my friend,” she says. “And honestly I’ve never tried to get the deal with you two, but he really cares about rescuing you and I’m pretty sure the way people were talking about how obviously you’d think yourself too good to marry him was getting under his skin. Fuck, even I was guilty of that. And now that bastard is going to send that horrible creation of his after Gavin and I’m trapped here and can’t help.”

“Actually, we’re not.”

Tina stares at him. “What? But Perkins said we were trapped.”

Nines studies Tina out of the corner of his eye, considering. Telling her about the curse would allow her to factor it into any sudden changes of plan they might need to make once facing Perkins’, but thinks better of it. After listening to her earlier it’s impossible now to forget that underneath all her sarcasm is a compassionate soul, one who’d expressed such worry for Nines’ happiness and offer a deceit that would surly count at treason both to Nines’ mother and against Prince Elijah if it would protect him. If she knows about the curse it might make her excessively cautious and Nines’ life is nothing compared to the fate of two kingdoms, if staying trapped as a swan forever is the price that must be paid to stop Perkins schemes then it’s a sacrifice he’s willing to be.

Ensuring that Prince Gavin isn’t caught in Perkins’ trap has to be Nines’ highest priority right now.

Of course, he could let Tina go and stay here himself, hope she’s successful and will come back with a rescue, but he’s spent too long with his fate in the hands of others and if something does go badly then he’d rather know about it, be there to help combat it.

“When Perkins took me, I was unconscious. I haven’t been able to get enough sense of our location to navigate and I didn’t think getting lost in the woods would help. And Perkins must think he has enough of a head start that it won’t matter if we follow.” And that Nines won’t follow and let himself be trapped by the curse and Tina’s knowledge of what Perkins is planning will sound like madness unless she’s accompanied by proof. “But you weren’t unconscious. Could you find a way back to somewhere we can call for reinforcements?”

“Well I was just at the castle this morning,” Tina says, “So I’d hope so.”

This morning. That means that with his stolen horse, the impostor could easily ride to Prince Gavin’s castle before nightfall, while it might take double that to walk. If they depart now they might be able to arrive and reveal the impostor to warn Gavin before Perkins’ plans come to fruition. If all goes well they can defeat Perkins this night and Nines’ curse will be broken by his death or Nines will turn back into a swan at daybreak and still have time to fly back to the lake before the curse becomes permanent. But if anything goes wrong…

It doesn’t matter. Not as long as Perkins threat is stopped.


	6. Chapter 6

When the news hits, it’s puzzling.

There are no cries of joy, no glasses hitting the floor, no frantic rushes to the gates — just confusion.

Gossip and rumour are commonplace in any castle, but these whispers have a single thread running true through all of them.

Prince Nines has returned.

Gavin doesn’t believe it at first. It’s a taunt, a jibe, the talk has been growing wilder the longer his search has dragged on, people who think it’s un-princely of him to put a missing fiancé from a not-quite fully allied nation above governance of his own people (as if he’d ever shown an interest in taking on the duties Elijah handles as regent), those who cannot understand his certainty that Nines was taken against his will, those who simply find his failed searches amusing.

Gavin ignores it, as he’s done with all the palace gossip of late.

If Nines had returned, it would be Tina who’d bring him the news.

But then the door of his chamber opens, without a knock which means one of only two people.

For a moment hope rises in his chest, that it will be Tina ready to confirm all of his suspicions, but when he turns it’s Elijah who steps through his doorway without waiting for an invitation, impatient as always but even more dour faced than usual.

Gavin lowers the blade he’d been sharpening. Elijah’s expression forecasts bad news, but Gavin doubts the bad new relates to his search for Nines since Elijah had hardly seemed to care that the match he’d once been pushing Gavin so hard for had fallen apart.

“You should really clean yourself up,” Elijah says and Gavin feels vaguely comforted by the knowledge that whatever has caused Elijah to venture from his tower to Gavin’s chambers isn’t so serious that his half-brother doesn’t have time for a snide remark. The peace only lasts a moment though, before Elijah continues, “Your fiancé is waiting for you in the green parlour of the north wing.”

“Oh tell me you haven’t.” Gavin scowls. Of all the fucking overbearing stunts for Elijah to pull, Gavin hadn’t thought he’d go _that _far. “I know you’re determined to match me off again, but a betrothal I had no involvement in was bad enough when I was a child, you can’t seriously think I’d put up with you making agreements on my behalf now.”

“I run your kingdom Gavin,” Elijah points out. “I make plenty of agreements on your behalf every day. But no, I have not made a replacement match for you. It seems Amanda’s errant heir has seen fit to return to our hospitality.”

The sword falls from Gavin’s grip, snagging his trousers and nicking the flesh beneath as it drops.

“Fuck!” he mutters, searching Elijah’s face for any indication that this is a lie or a joke. But there’s none. This isn’t Elijah’s occasionally warped sense of humour at work, his brother looks too tense for that, which means it must be true. “Where is he?”

Elijah rolls his eyes. “The green parlour,” he says, his exasperation making Gavin realise he’d already been told that, but he doesn’t have time for Elijah’s dramatics right now.

Gavin stands, ignoring the sword on the floor and the tear in his trousers, Nines might judge his appearance but Nines always does and right now Gavin doesn’t care about anything but confirming his return.

He nearly knocks over three maids and a visiting Marquis as he makes his way through the halls to the north wing

If Elijah is fucking with him, then Gavin swears to all that he holds dear that this regency will end in bloody execution.

But when he steps into parlour, Nines is sitting on a low couch, as prim and calm as if this were summer visit and one of those awkward afternoons when Elijah and Amanda forced them to do things like take tea together in what Gavin had always figured was a hopeless attempt to get some of Nines’ manners to rub off on him.

Gavin stumbled to a halt, opening his mouth and but saying nothing, the thoughts crowding his head to jumbled to find their way to his mouth.

“Prince Gavin.”

The greeting Nines offers accompanied by a placid smile, reminiscent of those Nines offers to courtiers who are uninteresting but in favour but which Gavin has never seen directed at him before. “It’s good to see you.”

“You vanished…” Gavin says and he’s meant it to be accusing but he finds the words come out breathy and confused.

Nines frowns. “Yes. I… I just needed some time away to think,” he says, and Gavin’s stomach drops. So he was wrong. There’s a quiet thread of relief that Nines is okay, Gavin isn’t a total asshole, but it’s swamped by the knowledge that he was wrong. That everyone else was right and Nines left voluntarily to get away from him.

But now he’s back and Gavin has no idea what to make of that. Does this mean that Nines has come around to the idea of marrying him? It seems a strange effect for distance to have, but here he is and talking civilly to Gavin at that.

“I searched for you,” Gavin says, feeling wrong-footed. He’d been so sure there was something suspect about Nines’ disappearance, that he would never abandoned his responsibilities, but clearly he’s badly misunderstood his fiancé’s character and Nines has caused all that fear and upheaval simple for space to think. As if there weren’t a thousand easier ways to arrange that. “Tina was in the forest following a lead on strange deliveries.”

“Yes, I know. She loaned me her horse to speed my way back and she’s following on foot,” Nines explains. “Didn’t the steward report that?”

“I didn’t get my news from a steward,” Gavin says. He hadn’t expected this. When Nines returned without Tina he’d assumed the event was unrelated to his own efforts, but if Nines came back of his own accord then perhaps that’s a stroke of its own good fortune, a sign that whatever anger had driven him to running away from the engagement has passed. “Why hurry back when you left so eagerly?”

“I understand now,” Nines says. “Time alone made me realise what I missed and when I heard of your search I realised that I’d misunderstood you. I wasn’t prepared for our wedding before, but now I am. Thank you for your patience.”

_Thank you for your patience._

Like he was talking about a soup course served late.

Nines is sitting, calm and casual, like he’d simply been on a jaunt through the gardens while Gavin had searched and he’d worried and he’d faced down all sorts of gossip and judgement and he can feel anger simmering in his gut, _how dare Nines do this to him?, _but then he remembers the way everyone had talked, like marriage to Gavin was some torment they pitied and he takes a steadying breath. Losing his temper now will only validate Nines’ decision to flee. He’d thought they understood each other, there was something oddly comforting in having an equal in Nines, not lording over him in judgement like Elijah and Amanda did but not subservient like a subject (because even Tina, for all that she was more fun than the rest, was somebody that Gavin was fundamentally responsible for and he had to be mindful of that power), and knowing he could act as he pleased because Nines would never hesitate to argue back or call him out, but clearly he’d misunderstood something and that’s what had driven Nines away. And as depressing as it is to realise that at least part of his concern for Nines has stemmed from a misunderstanding of his fiancé’s character, Gavin isn’t going to drive him away just moments after getting him back.

“People are going to want to celebrate your return,” he says instead, trying to force himself to focus on the fact that this is good news, a happy occasion, what he’s been waiting for and surely that’s more important than the fact Nines doesn’t seem to be treating his own disappearance with the same gravitas. As if abandoning his position was nothing.

“Yes, I’d heard the steward talking to the servants about arranging a ball tonight,” Nines says. “And perhaps we can use the opportunity to announce a date for our wedding. Before the summer is over, I hope.”

Gavin blinks at him. Them announce a date? And so soon? When it has always been Elijah and Queen Amanda pushing for the marriage? And Queen Amanda isn’t even present. “There’s no need to rush,” he points out. If anything, he suspects Nines’ disappearance and return will have earned them a reprieve from the pressure — quite enough has already happened this summer without throwing a hastily arranged royal wedding into the mix.

God, it’s going to be chaotic enough for the servants to get any semblance of a respectable ball organised on such short notice, not that it’s really his problem. If they’re smart he supposed they’ll be utilising what’s spare from all of the grand events that were cancelled after Nines vanished from the ball that had been supposed to open the season. But pulling a royal wedding together without suitable preparation time is a ridiculous demand to make of the staff. Unless Nines assumes they’re already prepared and were just waiting on him.

“I don’t think we should do anything too hasty,” Gavin hedges. “I mean, your people have been worried for you,” or at least worried about the implications of him abandoning his duties, “And I’m sure you want to speak with your mother first.” But the flicker of expression on Nines’ face makes Gavin wonder if in fact he very much does not want Queen Amanda involved. That’s a surprise. If Gavin could go through the rest of his life having nothing to do with the terrifying woman he would, but he’s always had Nines pegged as a momma’s boy who is genuinely comfortable with Amanda’s icy ways.

“Maybe you’ll reconsider at the ball,” Nines says, as if Gavin has ever been wishy-washy in his opinions.

But maybe this is the time to start. After all, he doesn’t want to look desperate, but setting a date might belay some of the embarrassment of having his fiancé vanish for weeks without a word. And it would be good to have some commitment of Nines’ willingness to actually go through with their marriage, which he must be since he’s returned. Unless Gavin drives him away at this ball too.

“Maybe,” Gavin says dubiously. “We’ll see.”

* * *

Walking towards the antechamber the royals always enter from, all Gavin can think of is the last disastrous ball which had ended in Nines fleeing. The last thing he wants is a repeat of that, but he barely knows that had driven his fiancé of the edge the first time let alone how to avoid it. It’s not his looks, despite what he’d said to Tina there’s no way Nines would be shallow enough to give up his kingdom just because Gavin’s face has so clearly taken a few hits, he’d been well-enough turned out the first time although there’s no harm in running his hands over his hair again just to be sure. His appearance is as pleasing to Nines as it’s likely to get though, at least not unless he demanded the royal tailors make him up clothes in the style of Nines’ own people and ditches his ceremonial sword which he’s always been told is kingly but he knows Nines thinks looks uncouth and thuggish.

Nines is waiting, looking as perfect as he always does. Gavin doubts he’s ever worried about a hair of place.

“You’re late,” he says and it makes Gavin’s gut clench. He’s always late to these things, if anything, tonight he’s far earlier than usual; but Nines had stopped pointing it out years ago. That he’s saying something now makes him wonder if Nines had expected his disappearance to change Gavin’s habits.

“Well, one of us has to be fashionable,” he points out. Nines might look better than him, but his clothes are in the style of his home country and look several years behind the current trends they’ll see in the ballroom tonight. “But I’m ready now, c’mon, let’s do this.”

He steps towards the doors, then pauses as Nines’ eyes drop to his arm. Gavin raises an eyebrow. Is he expecting Gavin to offer it? It’s a point of etiquette they’ve always avoided, unnecessary and inconvenient, but could his time away have changed Nines’ thinking so much?

Well, he’s already disappointed his fiancé once by showing up in an only somewhat more timely manner than usual, he can do this for Nines if it means getting through tonight without driving him off again.

It’s strange to be so close to him, even when dancing they’ve always kept a decorous distance, and Nines’ holding himself less stiffly than Gavin is used to, and as they step into the ballroom a side-ways glance reveals his face is alive with interest, rather than the polite but interested calm he usual sported when obligated to attend this sort of event.

The floor is crowded. Far more so than he’d expected given so many of their guests had departed after Queen Amanda’s entourage had quit the palace, the rumours have clearly spread quickly and brought people rushing back to confirm them. But the throng falls silent at the sight of them entering together, Nines on Gavin’s arm, people coming to a stop as they take in their future kings side by side at last, a vision of what is soon to become normalcy.

Gavin breathes deep. He’s never liked balls, nor the crowds of courtiers who always seemed to find him wanting, but tonight feels different. With Nines on his arm willingly, because he’s finally chosen Gavin rather than merely grudgingly acquiesced to lowering himself, this feels less like an awkward performance and more like the beginning of a future they could actually make work.

People are watching them as they move towards the banqueting table, they’re going to expect a speech and Nines words about announcing a marriage date are still ringing in his ears. It feels like a bad idea, rushing into something so soon after Nines’ return just looks desperate and it would be a huge breach in etiquette to declare anything without involving Queen Amanda, but Gavin isn’t sure he’s going be able to enjoy his meal with that tension hanging over him.

“We should dance first,” Nines suggests.

Gavin startles, turning to stare at him. It would be huge break from traditional form, Elijah is waiting for them at the table, dishes will go cold. Other people can dance, but the royals always eat first.

The notion of Nines being rebellious sends a thrill through him.

Elijah will bitch later, but soon Gavin will be king and he won’t need his brother’s approval anymore. He grips Nines’ arm a little tighter and turns them both towards the dancefloor.

There’s a moment of awkwardness as they attempt to settle into a dancing posture, they’re joining a set already in motion rather than waiting for a new song, but then Nines is in Gavin’s arms and they’re falling into step with the other dancers.

Every step is strange and a first Gavin puts it down to his own rusty footwork, he never dances with anybody other than Nines at these things and while Elijah always forces him to see a dancing master to refresh his steps before the summer visits he’s been neglecting this particular skill while Nines has been missing, but then Gavin recognises the chance for the far more bizarre thing it is: Nines asked for this dance but this time, for the first time, he’s not pushing to lead.

There's no conflict as they move across the floor but it doesn't make their steps smooth, if anything they stumble more than ever, Gavin is too used to Nines pushing back and now he's willingly following they're mismatched.

“I’ve missed dancing,” Nines says as they turn, and Gavin almost stumbles because he’d never considered that Nines might actually find enjoyment in this sort of thing, rather than finding it the unwanted duty that Gavin does.

“You could have attended many balls if you’d been here,” Gavin points out and Nines frowns, looking unsettled by the reminder of his desertion.

No doubt he thinks it’s tasteless of Gavin to remind him of it.

“I only mean it’s good to have you back,” Gavin corrects, fumbling for unpractised niceties with which to smooth the conversation, “And you look gorgeous,” but fuck, no, that was what had driven Nines away last time, Gavin had better reasons this time had thought long and hard about them, it was just that whenever he looked at Nines every sensible thought vanished from his head.

But instead of becoming annoyed again, Nines’ cheeks pink and he says, “Thank you,” with a small sweet smile that causes Gavin to really miss a step and stumble closer to him.

This is how Elijah had always told him things ought to go, Nines accepting Gavin as a future king, admiring him and deferring to his leadership.

Tina’s version had been a little bit different, she actually knew Nines outside of official functions, and although their acquaintance was only every other year she’d recognised that Nines had as much a right and raising to kingship as Gavin would never submit but if their marriage was successful then respect might grow between them, Nines’ trusting Gavin enough to follow his lead under the right circumstances.

But Gavin knows Nines better than any of them and has always been certain that they were deluded to think he’d ever drop out of his hauteur and stubbornness, and certainly not in the scant weeks that Nines has been missing.

Everyone else might accept Nines finally acting like a future husband as their hopes finally coming to fruition but as he suggests they step away from the dancing for a time and Nines agrees without any pointed remarks about his lack of stamina and how taking a break might appear to their public Gavin grows surer in his gut that something here is very wrong.

Why would Nines be in such a hurry to return when he ran away in the first place? So determined to get back to Gavin that he'd forget all sense of chivalry and leave Tina behind to walk while Nines rode her horse back to the comfort of the castle...

Gavin jerks himself away, and unsheathes his sword.

“Impostor!”

The fake Nines’ eyes go wide and Gavin can see the dancers around them crashing to a halt, but he keeps his attention on ‘Nines’, who is starting at him in shock.

“Gavin, what’s wrong?” he says, against with the uncharacteristic intimacy, but his behaviour just confirms Gavin’s suspicions. If he’d ever gone mad and drawn his blade in a ballroom before, Nines’ first instinct would have been damage control, not asking after his well-being. Whoever this impostor is, he did a poor job at researching his role.

“Who are you? Where is the real Nines?!” Gavin demands, raising the point of his sword to the fake’s throat, “Who took him?”

“Nobody was taken! I told you, I just needed time and space to think before embracing such a big duty,” the impostor argues. “I always intended on returning to you and honouring our engagement.”

The duty argument is believable, but there’s no reference to his country or his mother, no justification beyond personal feelings for why he’d fled in the first place. Anyway, it’s his return as much as the absence that is suspicious. “Nines would never have left Tina behind,” Gavin points out. They were never close, Tina has always been too firmly Gavin’s for them to have bonded during Nines’ visits, but Nines had always been chivalrous to her and never less than civil with any of Gavin’s people. Nines wouldn’t have abandoned even the most irritating squire in the woods just to secure his own comfort, let alone a respected knight. “You’re a fake, and not even a good one.”

The fraud reaches out to him again, the picture of tragedy, eyes wide and glistening with tears. “Gavin, I know we’ve been through a lot but—” his lip quivers, voice breaking off into a sob.

No kind heart would find it possible not to be moved by such a sight, Nines begging in such agony for his consideration.

Gavin jerks away from the hands at his sleeve. “Oh, shut up!”

“Gavin, please!”

He scoffs, the display has only confirmed his suspicions. Nines would never beg or cry, even when they’d been children he’d had more dignity than that. Nines would scorn Gavin for being disagreeable, point out the flaws in his logic, or simply dismiss the disagreement as being unprincely and unworthy of his notice. And Nines never just calls him Gavin.

The whole room is staring at them. Elijah’s throne sits abandoned and Gavin’s sure his half-brother is already pushing through the crowds to reprimand him for acting in a way that’s entirely inappropriate coming from one royal to another.

But what their audience think of his manners doesn’t matter.

What matters is that they see the fraud for who he is.

“Nines would have sent for his mother.”

“I have, I just didn’t want to disturb you with family matters,” the impostor lies.

“And heard back already? Does your family have the fastest messenger birds on the planet? Because you’ve been making some awfully big pronouncements,” Gavin says. “Certainly not things you’d say without your mother’s approval. After all, I can get away with things because Elijah is _my _regent, I’ll be King the moment I come of age, but you’re Queen Amanda’s heir and subject to her rule, so it would be terribly poor form to make big decisions like announcing a date for your wedding without her agreement. And I know she raised you better than that.”

“My mother trusts me to make decisions in her stead,” the fake says, which would be news to Gavin if it were true. Which it’s not. “We’ve discussed the engagement in great detail, I know her plans and can enact them without her. I think the stress is getting to you, perhaps we should go somewhere cooler—”

Gavin laughs wildly. “Your mother is the biggest control freak I’ve ever met.” The second is Nines himself, but he always acquiesces to Queen Amanda’s will.

“I know we’ve had our disagreements,” the impostor says, as if all those boyhood fights and the fact the real Nines walked out on him can be so tidily summed up, “But-”

“C’mon ‘Nines’,” Gavin taunts, stepping closer to the fake, the crows parting as Gavin herds him towards the door guards who are presently staring in shock. “Surely you must remember those summers.”

“Gavin—”

“All those times I pushed you in the dirt or tore pages from your books, but you’d always look for your mother’s approval before getting your revenge,” he says, “But now you’re neglecting her? Now you’re in such a hurry to marry me?”

Gavin knows they can’t carry on like this, all the other dancers have stopped to stare and yet another public fight with his recently returned ‘fiancé’ is a scandal in the making, but when the interruption comes isn’t his brother.

“Oh, your highness, I am disappointed,” a voice calls out and Gavin glances over his shoulder, sword never wavering, to take in the sight of a man approaching. He’s vaguely familiar, a scholar associate of Elijah’s, but nobody Gavin has ever had cause to speak to and certainly no one whose status justifies the way the crowd parts around him and the imperious manner with which he addresses Gavin. “I would have expected somebody in your position to be more courteous to my young friend here. He is your future husband after all.”

“He is not,” Gavin says. Many of the courtiers have been around since he was a child and Gavin’s youthful misdeeds might not often be acknowledged but they are remembered. There is bound to be some among them who realise that the real Nines could never have forgotten the details of those boyhood fights.

“No, you have rather ruined that plan haven’t you, you impetuous boy. Elijah clearly underestimated you.”

“Who the hell are you?” Gavin demands. The man’s calm tone compared to the impostor’s overwhelmed aura suggests that he’s the real threat, but Gavin isn’t going to risk shifting his aim and momentarily leaving both of them free to attack him. He just wishes that some of the guards would back him up — however much of a scene he’s making, he is their future king, and even if he wasn’t surely Elijah would have them step in to keep the peace. Except the newcomer is claiming a connection to the regent.

“Gav!”

He’d recognise Tina’s voice anywhere, turns to look over his shoulder, and finds her face in the crowd at the same time she cries, “Look out!”

But beside her is Nines, the real Nines, because nobody else could look so bedraggled and so haughty at once without seeming false. He’s pushing past subjects who are pointing and whispering, eyes now darting between Nines and the impostor and Gavin can’t help the grin curling his lips because finally people are going to see that he was right all along.

“No! No, I will not be defeated!” the impostor’s co-conspirator shouts behind him. “If I cannot take your kingdoms covertly then I will take them by conquest.”

Gavin turns to face the threat, raising his sword in expectation of a battle of arms, them recoils in horror as the stranger’s form warps and twists.

“He’s an enchanter!” Tina calls out. “Gavin, run!”

People around him are screaming and fleeing, but Gavin ignores Tina’s orders. The stranger is stretching and coiling, a dark enormous mass, and there is nowhere to run to as he unfurls his monstrous form.

And then Gavin is standing in the shadow of a dragon.

The room erupts in screams.

All Gavin can do is stand and stare as people around him flee. A dragon. It towers over him, it’s enormity staggering. He’d read about dragons, had known the sizes they could grow to, but he’s never truly comprehended the sheer power of them until confronted with reality.

Two strokes of the creature’s wings and he’s crashed through the ballroom ceiling, beams and slate crashing down onto those who haven’t yet pushed their way out of the doors as the beast blocks out the light of the moon.

Except for Nines and Tina, who are swimming against the torrent of fleeing partygoers, towards Gavin and the dragon.

The fraudulent Nines has vanished, slipped past Gavin in the chaos of the beast’s transformation, and Gavin’s inner tactician makes a note that he might still be a risk to be aware of but it’s a very small note as most of his head-space is occupied by his self-preservation instinct and that fact that _oh fuck, oh hell, you have got to be shitting me, there__’s a dragon in the fucking ballroom_.

No fire breath it seems, or surely they’d all be toast already. That trait must be limited to true dragons not magical impostors. It means that to land a hit on Gavin he’ll have to come within range for Gavin to strike back, but that’s a small comfort when fighting a creature the size of a building that could crush him with a single blow and has claws almost as long as his arm.

Tina came armed and armoured, she might not have fully agreed with Gavin’s search for Nines but she’d taken her part in it as seriously as any quest, but Nines is still wearing his clothes from the ball, from the night he disappeared, finery in ruins now. He’s grabbed a sword from somewhere, but Gavin knows far too well that Nines has trained for fencing and formal duelling but that Amanda had preferred her son study statesmanship than sword-work and that Nines has little experience in _really _using a weapon.

He absolutely doesn’t have the skills to hold his own against a dragon, but, Gavin admits to himself as he flings himself sideward to avoid a wild swing of the beast’s mace-like tail, it’s not like Gavin’s experiences against country bandits really compare either.

And it has to have a weakness. After all, why else would the sorcerer bother attempting some elaborate scheme of kidnapping Nines and putting an impostor in place, rather than just turning into a dragon and eating everyone that objected to his rule?

Why the hell is there a sorcerer that can turn into a dragon conspiring with an impostor of his fiancé at all?

“What the hell is going on?” he hollers over at Tina who glares back. “Where have you been? Is Nines okay?!”

“Enchanter Perkins,” she shouts back. “Kidnapped Nines to take over both Kingdoms. Elijah helped him. Dragon now, explanations later, Gavin!”

Perkins sounds familiar, though Gavin can’t place where he’s heard the name before. And a second voice confirming Elijah’s connection to the man is… useful, if not what he was hoping for. But she has a point about his timing, and Gavin has no more chance for talking anyway as he has to dive under a table to evade a shower of rubble as the dragon’s wings bring yet more of the ceiling crashing down.

Fuck. He’s in formal wear with a ceremonial sword. What the hell is he supposed to do against a dragon, bigger than a house and covered with scaly natural armour.

No. No that’s loser thinking. It has to have a weak point. Gavin thinks of armour and animals, squints up and examines the beast’s joints. The scales look thinner there. Not thin, but perhaps penetrable.

A scan of the rest of the room reveals Tina is scaling statuary and Gavin gapes for a moment before he realises that if she can get to the top of the thing then she might be able to take a shot at the dragon’s wing joints, and Nines, ever in service of his people, is helping stragglers from the debris.

The dragon could take any of them out with a single well-aimed swipe of its claws.

A ghastly shriek and the way the dragon suddenly lists sideways suggests that Tina’s attempt on its wings has been at least a partial success, but when Gavin glances around he can’t pick her out of the wreckage.

There’s no time for a more thorough search, he rushes forward to make his own strike, has to divert almost immediately as the dragon rears back and then nearly lands on top of him, but then he’s in close.

The blade he’s worn for the ball is ceremonial but its still sharp enough for its purpose, though Gavin is acutely aware that he’s unarmoured as he rolls out from under the path of an enormous limb and swings his sword up to slash at the tendons, then immediately dives back towards cover.

He’s lost sight of both of the others now, hopes like hell that Nines has run because he’s not equipped for battle, hopes like hell that Tina has run after landing her hit because no amount of equipment is sufficient for battle with a dragon.

Wishes like hell that he could run, but this is his castle and his kingdom and that makes the monster before him his responsibility.

There will be no clean way of ending this fight. There are old tales of dragon’s being defeated, but those stories have never involved anything that could be described as victory for those going up against them.

The longer this drags on the greater the risk of one of them getting hurt is. He can’t even see that Tina and Nines are okay, has to assume they’re still in this fight by the way the dragon is intermittently distracted from swatting at him, but even if the beast doesn’t get them the collapsing castle is liable to crush them if they don’t bring things to a stop.

Gavin has always been a fighting man. If he’s going to die, he’d rather it be at the claws of a dragon than a falling chandelier.

So when the dragon turns its head, seeking out his hiding place, Gavin abandons his shelter and lunges at the opening, blade thrust into its throat.

It’s hard. Gavin has enough experience with his blade to know that even with the sharpest sword, killing isn’t like cutting butter. But even the more delicate underside of the dragon’s throat is nigh on impenetrable, his sword feeling like it’s penetrating only by inches even with his whole weight behind it. And then, from the corner of his eye, he sees it, the dragon’s huge hand sweeping in to bat him away and so in the last moment he braces his feet and twists, tightening his grip on the blade so that when the dragon knocks him sideways, talons shredding the front of his shirt to gouge at his chest, the sword is dragged with him, the creature’s own strength making the cut.

And then the sword slips from his grip and Gavin isn’t sure if it’s because of the blood pouring from the dragon making things slippery or the blood pouring from his chest making him weak.

He’s hit the dirt hard in training before, but all of that feels like it was child’s play as he crashes down onto the ballroom tiles.

The dragon is lashing out, wings beating gusts that cause the tapestries to flutter on the walls, tail crashing through a window, but it’s movements are direction-less, it’s not finishing Gavin off and he doesn’t think it’s striking at Nines or Tina although he’s lost track of their position.

It’s in its death throes.

And when he can’t find the strength to roll away from its thrashing moments, Gavin realises it might not be the only one.

He draws both hands up, feeling at the wounds on his chest. He hadn’t served as a solider and a knight for years without learning at little about wound treatment and he knows he ought to press down on the cuts, hold the blood —and worse— in. But the gouges of the dragon’s claws are far longer than a hand-span.

Gavin’s seen wounds like his before, dragons haven’t been a problem for centuries, but he’s seen wounds half the size from more commonplace beasts and he’s never seen a man survive them.

He’s as defeated now as the dragon beside him as, with a crash the shakes the castle to its foundations, it finally falls still.

It’s over.

The great beast is defeated.

Gavin’s eyes drift shut. It’s over. It’s over and it doesn’t matter that his hands are weak on his chest, collapsed onto his wounds rather than treating them. It’s over and the room is reduced to rubble around him. It’s over and as regent Elijah ought to take the clean-up off Gavin’s hands but the dead dragon beside had been one of Elijah’s associates and Elijah had reacted so oddly to Nines’ return and been so un-regally absent from the celebration and with blood draining out of him Gavin barely has the strength to breath or think let alone do both at once but pieces are coming together in his mind, assembling into a horrifying picture but then he hears a sound and forces his eyes open.

“Gavin!” the voice is slightly muffled, but he’d recognise Tina anywhere.

“T—” he chokes on a wet breath, spits a mouthful of blood, and then tries again. “Tina!”

It comes out weak again, but it’s enough. Tina’s next cry is clearer and the one after that clearer still, as if she’s coming towards him.

And there’s a noise from the other side and he turns his head left to see Nines scrambling over the dragon’s carcass, the first inelegant movement Gavin has even seen from him, and towards Gavin.

Inelegant, but unharmed. Or at least, far less harmed than Gavin. His hair is powdery with debris and his clothes are even more ragged than they were on his arrival, he winces as he lands two footed on the tiles, favouring his left side and he runs over, but upright and whole despite going up against a dragon almost defenceless.

A shadow falls over Gavin and he looks up to see Tina standing over him: one arm hanging at an awkward, dislocated angle and a deep cut to her brow but also still standing.

They’re both going to be okay.

But a wounded cry escapes Tina as she drops to the floor by his side and for a moment Gavin thinks she’s been hurt somewhere he can’t see but then she’s leaning over him and presses her hands to his lacerated chest, managing more pressure than Gavin although even a second set of hands can’t cover the length of his wounds.

“Oh, fuck, Gavin, this isn’t…”

His wounds. Her alarm is for him. Gavin’s sigh of relief triggers a bout of agonising coughing that has Tina paling in alarm as she glances over at Nines. “Come here, you put pressure on his wounds, and I’ll go get help.”

“No, stay,” Gavin gasps out as Nines joins them, kneeling in the mess of human and dragon blood without so much as a flinch as the mess. Gavin pities whoever is going to have to clean this place up.

Tina ignores him. “Gavin, you need a doctor.” Her eyes are wide but her voice is firm, steady in command, and Gavin wishes he’d had the chance to knight her for real.

It’s too late for that now. He’s beyond her limited medical abilities, true, but running for a healer isn’t the fix. There is one form of aid she could still render but it requires her to remain. “Stay, I need you.”

“I can fetch a doctor,” Nines says, moving as if to rise again, and how chivalrous of him, to allow Tina to stay and comfort her dying friend but that’s not what Gavin actually wants.

“I need you _both!__”_

He still has one final plan that hadn’t been ruined, but he’s going to need both of them for it to work.

With Tina putting pressure on the wound he’s free to reach out, grabbing one of Nines’ hands and clasping it in both of his own. Drawing on what is left of his strength for a last-ditch attempt to salvage this disaster.

“In the eyes of this witness, I, Gavin Neil Alexander Reed, do vow—”

Nines tries to pull his hand back, but Gavin uses a well of strength he hadn’t thought he had left in him to hold on. “Nines—” he gasps. “Please.”

“Gavin,” Tina says, voice thick with concern. “Gavin, what are you…? You just need to rest.”

No. He needs to get these words out. But Nines has him locked in an unfathomable stare and Tina looks like she might try once more to run for the door. This won’t work unless they’re with him.

“All we need is one witness,” Gavin explains desperately, jerking his head in Tina’s direction. Everyone knows that she’s his closest friend, nobody would dare question her word. “Then the kingdoms are joined. Nothing anyone, fuck, nothing _Elijah_ can do. No doubt as to your claim on them,” he says, squeezing Nines’ hand. They’ve both known all along that Nines was better suited to the role, now he can have everything he was meant to as a widower, without the burden of an unwanted husband.

“You can worry about that later,” Tina says, even as the look in her eyes gives away plainly that she knows as well has he does that there might not be a later.

But, good friend though she is, Tina isn’t the one who matters here. Gavin looks up at Nines, knowing that there’s no point making the vows unless Nines will say them in return. “I know you don’t…” he tries to draw a deep breath, to explain that Nines might not want this marriage but their kingdoms need it and it’s not like Nines will have to be his husband for long, but the act sends pain coursing through him, no, he’s in no condition to be patient about this. “Nines, I need you.”

“I…” Nines glances down, taking in the injuries that Gavin hasn’t bothered to look at because he can already feel how badly shredded he is, doesn’t need to watch himself die. “…Yes. Do it.”

Fuck. Now all Gavin has to do is say the words and maybe somebody can still get a happy ending out of this. “In…” No, he’s already said that part and there’s no time for repetition, “I do vow to thee my loyalty—”

He breaks off, throat tight as he gasps to draw breath enough to continue, blood spilling from his lips as he coughs. Hardly the royal celebration they’d been meant to have. It hurts as he chokes in air, but he’s known these words almost from the moment he could talk, has been waiting his whole life to say them.

“—vow to thee my loyalty, my strength—” what fragments of it there are left when he can feel the life draining out of him with every heartbeat “—my life, and all that I can give.”

And what Gavin can give is his kingdom and Nines’ freedom from marriage to Gavin, and if they’re lucky it might be enough protect Nines from being pressured into another unwanted marriage too, nobody would believe he was acting out of devotion to Gavin -not when most of them thought Nines fled the country to get away from him- but Nines could argue to his mother that remarrying would be a bad political choice because it would offend Gavin's people. Gavin hasn't got the breath to explain that now, but Nines is smart, he'll figure it out.

“Your hopes are my hopes, your health is my health,—” although not now, and thank fuck for that when Gavin’s health is non-existent, “—your happiness, my happiness. I pledge to thee my hand, my soul, my heart. All I have,” another coughing fit and Nines tries to pull back the hand Gavin is clasping, no doubt intending for it to join the other in steadying him, but Gavin holds fast, “and all I am is yours, until the last sunset. This I swear.” The final words are barely more than a gasp, but although the hardest part is over, the marriage isn’t sealed yet and it takes another hard squeeze of Nines hands to prompt him to speak.

“In the eyes of this witness, I, I… Gavin…” Nines breaks off and it’s the first time he’s offered Gavin that intimate address but there’s no time for hesitation now. Whatever qualms Nines has about marrying a dying a man to take his throne will have to wait until the act is done.

“Please,” Gavin chokes, more blood spilling from his lips. He needs Nines to give him this. He can’t have searched so long and fought so hard only to fail now. For a moment there’s nothing but the pounding of his heart but then Nine’s spare hand comes up to clasp Gavin’s in return.

“I, Nines Conrad Richard Cain Stern, do vow to thee—” the words are sharp and hurried, Nines must see the urgency of their situation now. Gavin blinks, then forces his heavy eyes back open, all he had to do is hold on a few lines longer “—can give. Your hopes—”

Has Nines skipped ahead? Doesn’t he realise that might invalidate it? Gavin’s sure that Tina will say whatever she has to see this through, she’s spent the last few months helping Gavin search for Nines and most of their lives being his friend, she’ll know what needs to happen. Still, Gavin wants to hear the words, he’s waited long enough but Nines’ voice is fading and Gavin tries to grip his hand tighter, they need to see this through to the end, but his strength is truly faded now, pooled in rich red around them as Gavin strains to hear the words but finds them lost to the darkness that finally claims him.


	7. Chapter 7

Pain.

That’s the first thing Gavin notices.

Strange, because the last thing he remembered was the pain fading as the life drained out of him.

If death hurts, that completely un-fuckin’-fair.

It takes him a few moments to gather the strength to open his eyes, his whole body feels like it’s being weighed down by something impossibly heavy, but when he musters the strength he’s met by a familiar sight.

This isn’t an afterlife. It’s his bed.

Unless the afterlife looks like his bed. But that seems unlikely.

It seems less likely still when he musters the strength to raise his head and takes sight of his own bandage swathed chest.

Probably not dead then.

It’s a relief, he supposes, he didn’t want to be dead. But he hadn’t really planned past this point and thinking about that brings all the events that have brought him to this point.

In a panic, he tries to push himself up, only to collapse with a pained moan. There’s so much that needs to be done but he doesn’t have the strength, he remembers slaying the beast but what of Elijah’s treachery, what of—

The door pushes open and he’s relieved of one worry as Tina, looking wan and exhausted and oh so relieved, enters.

“Fucking finally,” she says, flopping into the seat beside the bed. “Goddamit Gavin, it’s just like you to be in bed while everybody else is working.”

Normally Gavin would laugh but right now he’s got so many questions he hardly knows where to begin. “The fuck…” he begins, then pauses, because, honestly, there’s just too much. What the fuck was up with Perkins the magic dragon? How the fuck had he got into the castle and why the fuck had Elijah seemed to be co-operating with him? Who the fuck was the fake Nines and where the fuck had the real Nines been all this time? When the fuck had Tina found him and what the fuck is going to happen now he’s back?

Tina laughs softly. “Oh Gav. Way to sum it up.”

“What’s happening?” Gavin asks, frowning. With everything that’s happened he probably ought to be stepping up to at least some of the duties of a crown prince. “I should—”

“You need to keep resting, got it? Everything is under control,” she says, “The fake Nines is being kept under observation, he’s a creation of sorcery but he had some sort of episode at the same time Perkins died and he seems to be in control of himself now in a way that he wasn’t before so… well, nobody is really sure what to make of him.”

“We’re sure Perkins dead?” Gavin interjects. He’d thought his strike fell true, but people had celebrated Perkins’ defeat before. The issue of the impostor will likely be a thorny one, especially since Tina seems to be saying he’s not some likely looking distant cousin brought into play the part but born of magic, but Gavin’s also fairly content to let him be somebody else’s problem for the time being.

“And decomposing,” Tina says, with more than a little viciousness. “His body is under guard and I’ve sent a contingent out to his castle although right now they’re just holding the perimeter. We don’t want to breach without an expert on sorcery checking for traps and…”

And the foremost expert in the kingdom is a traitor. There would be others of course, the fact that it was forbidden had never stopped people doing anything else and Gavin doubted sorcery was an exception, but it would take time to make contact and come to arrangements to draw on magical assistance without condemning whoever came to their aid or setting a messy legal precedent of making a loophole in the ban on magic.

“How is Elijah?” he says. Had his half-brother really been conspiring with Perkins? He still can’t wrap his head around it. Certainly, Elijah had been fascinated by the potential of sorcery, but Gavin had never though his brother would allow himself to become entangled with practitioners of the dark arts or swayed to treason.

“He’s alive,” Tina assures him. “Locked in the dungeon and monologuing about tests to the guards, but there'll be time to deal with him once you're stronger.”

“I can't believe he tried to have me killed,” Gavin murmurs. He'd never been close with his much older brother and that Elijah being from their mother's first marriage meant he was burned with the throne until Gavin was old enough but he’d thought the bonds of family and duty had been strong enough that they were on the same side, even if they’d so often disagreed on personal matters.

“I don't know what he was trying,” Tina remarks. “He definitely helped Perkins snatch Nines and he's been practising the forbidden arts not just studying them, but he seemed truly surprised by the impostor Nines and Perkins turning into the great beast, and he used magic to heal you to a state the surgeons could work on.”

Had Elijah tried to use Perkins, arrogant enough to think he could outwit the dark sorcerer? That sounds far more like Gavin's brother, although Gavin isn’t sure how Elijah could benefit from having Nines taken.

Which brings Gavin to questions that he’s not sure he’s ready to hear the answer to but can’t wait any longer to ask.

“Nines…” he starts, then can’t bring himself to ask what he ought to so instead he focuses on Tina. “You found him and got him back,” he says, and fuck, he’s so grateful to her for that. He’s knighting her the moment he’s strong enough to lift a sword and anybody who tries to tell him he doesn’t have the authority is getting run through. Still, Nines had been missing for a long time and who knew what he’d been through. “Is he…?”

“He’s fine,” Tina assures Gavin. “He’s here and he’s written to his mother explaining everything and we aren’t sure if it was what you said or what you did but he didn’t turn back into a swan the secretive—”

“He didn’t what?!” Gavin splutters, pushing himself up in alarm only to set off a coughing fit that has him collapsing back to the sheets with a pained groan.

“Fuck. Gavin,” Tina says, leaping up from her chair, “Are…? I should get a doctor!”

“No!” Gavin insists, trying to focus on taking so deep breaths. “No, it’s fine. Lesson learned about trying to fuckin’ sit up. Now tell me about Nines.”

Tina sits, although she’s perched on the edge of her seat as if ready to leap up at the first sign of Gavin further aggravating his injury. “He… Perkins put a curse on him and it was supposed to stick if he escaped and he didn’t warn me it would be dangerous for him to come here but it’s fine, he’s fine, the spell is broken, even if we aren’t really sure how.”

“He’s okay?” Gavin confirms shakily. If he’d done all of this only to lose Nines to sorcery…

“Other than you worrying half the life of him,” Tina grumbles. “And me. But I sent a servant to fetch him when you started to stir, that was the only reason no one was with you when you woke, I hadn't meant to take so long.”

“It’s fine,” Gavin assures her. Awaking alone had been jarring, but with Elijah imprisoned and Gavin unconscious the burden on Tina must have been immense.

Tina nods. “We’ve been trading off watching you, but Nines has taken the lead keeping things in order here since Elijah is in the dungeons and you’ve been out cold for nearly a week.”

A week? Fuck. Gavin had guessed from how shitty he feels and the fact he’d thought that he was dying that he must be in a bad shape, but the knowledge that he’s bee unconscious for days… is strange but rapidly superseded by the thought of Nines governing while Gavin rested.

“He’s running things? Then… the… did you make sure people know that…”

“You passed out before the vows could be finished,” Tina says and Gavin’s stomach drops.

“But did you tell them that we’d got it done?” Gavin asks, suddenly unsure of what he wants to hear. If he’d died then Nines needed to have been married to him, but now it seems he’s somehow made it through and it’s probably for the best that they never finished, that, no matter how long he’d been waiting, he’d never got to hear Nines pledge himself fully. If the vows weren’t completed then Nines isn’t bound to him, the thought of him having made those promises thinking that Gavin would die before anything came of them and being trapped by them instead sending a roiling wave of pain through Gavin that he doesn’t think has anything to do with his injuries.

Before Tina can answer, though, the door opens a second time and Gavin’s mind blanks at he takes in the sight of Nines.

His hair is ruffled and his clothes creased, shadows hanging under his eyes, and yet even now there’s something overpoweringly regal about him that nobody else could ever hope to compare to.

“How is he?” Nines asks Tina, as if Gavin isn’t right there.

“I want to get a physician to look at him again, but he seems steady,” Tina says. “And he remembers everything that happened.”

“Good,” Nines says firmly, then perches on the edge of Gavin’s bed, reaching out to take one of his hands in a delicate grip and lift it carefully to be held between Nines’ own.

“In the eyes of this witness, I, Nines Conrad Richard Cain Stern, do vow to thee my loyalty, my strength, my life, and all that I can give.”

Gavin’s jaw drops. No. No, this wasn’t the plan. Nines can’t be free of him if he goes through with the vows while Gavin is alive, and Gavin can hardly go through with the original backup plan to fake his death to leave when he doesn’t even have the strength to sit up. He wants to stop him but the words don’t come out and Nines is saying the vows now with the same urgency he’d given them when Gavin was dying in his arms, there’s no chance for Gavin to gather his thoughts before Nines is continuing, “Your hopes are my hopes, your health is my health, your happiness, my happiness.”

“Nines, you don’t—” Gavin starts to interrupt but Tina shushes him and Nines tightens his grip on Gavin’s hand ever so slightly and presses on.

“I pledge to thee my hand, my soul, my heart. All I have and all I am is yours, until the last sunset, this I swear.”

Then he raises their joined hands and presses his lips to Gavin’s knuckles in the most tender of kisses, it’s an action Gavin has seen at weddings before but it’s not required by the ceremony —political matches don’t indulge in false gestures— it’s something that happens only when lovers marry.

Because they’re married now. They’ve both said the vows in front of a witness and Nines is his husband, forever and always, come what may.

“Nines…”

The man is clasping Gavin’s hand is as a stranger to the cold, haughty prince he’s spent years dreading the company of: ruffled, open, all the ice has melted from those deep blue eyes and left behind pools of some desperate and unnameable emotion that Gavin feels like he could drown in.

He reaches up with his other hand, the effort of that small motion taking more strength than swinging his sword in the battle against Perkins had, but he manages to reach up and bring his hand up so that the joining is equal, both of their hands embracing as he anchors himself to Nines.

And in all the years of their betrothal Gavin has never seen him smile like this, oh he has a polite look of vague regal interest that he wears fixedly for the public, but this —soft, uncertain, sincere— changes his whole face, strips away the mask of the distant untouchable Prince and leaves behind only Nines.

His husband.

“Nines… I…” he says. His vows weren’t an attempt to coerce Nines into the marriage Gavin still isn’t certain he wants. Perkins might have been the reason he disappeared, but so many people couldn’t have put the blame on his feelings for Gavin if there wasn’t something to that at well. The tenderness now is making him question his own judgement though. If it could be like this… “You didn’t have to… I never wanted you to feel trapped…” Fuck he’s so weak.

But Nines just squeezes his hand gently. “Tina told me everything,” he says.

“Yes, and what happened to you?” Gavin presses. “Tina said something about a curse?”

“It’s broken, don’t worry about that now,” Nines says. “You need to rest. A physician should be here shortly.”

“I’m fine,” Gavin says, though it’s a transparent lie. He’s weak as a kitten and aches all over, but making a fuss about it won’t help. “I don’t need a doctor.”

“You are not, and you do. You almost… you… I feared you were going to make a widower of me before I could finish our vows,” Nines says, and a flicker of annoyance creeps through his tenderness. “I… that’s… why must you always be intolerable, Gavin?”

Why must he? Gavin stares at Nines, so little of this makes sense to him, but there’s one thing he does know. He risked making a widower of Nines for the good of the kingdoms, and the only person he’s ever met who’s held duty so highly is Nines himself.

“For you,” he says, and smiles at the way Nines’ brow furrows deeper.

They’re still strangers to each other in so many ways, there’s so much they’ll learn and have to balance to make the marriage work, but for the first time, Gavin thinks they might make it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, it's been a ride! I first thought of this fic late last summer and wrote an outline and a few scenes before getting sidetracked then picked it up again when the big bang came around and it absolutely wouldn't have got finished without the support of the mods when I was having deadline issues ('then he fights the dragon' seemed so great when I was adding it to the outline - then all of a sudden I had to work out how the hell to write a dragon fight!) and my amazing artist Minas who stepped up to pinch hit and who's beautiful work in progress updates kept me motivated through the final stages of writing - please head over to [twitter](https://twitter.com/Minas_Norma/status/1173650779988795393?s=09) or [tumblr](https://minasnorma.tumblr.com/post/187759178748/my-contribution-to-the-reed900bb2019-i-worked) to check out his seriously amazing artwork and show some love!


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